Julie Henry > Julie's Quotes

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.”
― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter

“For instance, there is no light without darkness—and this troubles many of us—but without it, how else would we tell one from the other? We spend half of every day in darkness; surely we should make our peace with this.”
― Mark Frost, Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier

“Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can’t be trusted—? What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight towards a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster?”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“A wise man once told me that mystery is the most essential ingredient of life, for the following reason: mystery creates wonder, which leads to curiosity, which in turn provides the ground for our desire to understand who and what we truly are.”
― Mark Frost, The Secret History of Twin Peaks

“Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“Let us toast to animal pleasures, to escapism, to rain on the roof and instant coffee, to unemployment insurance and library cards, to absinthe and good-hearted landlords, to music and warm bodies and contraceptives... and to the "good life", whatever it is and wherever it happens to be.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman

“When the going gets weird, the weird turn professional.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72

“I want to leave, to go somewhere where I should be really in my place, where I would fit in . . . but my place is nowhere; I am unwanted.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

“What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human [...] is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“It’s a very American illness, the idea of giving yourself away entirely to the idea of working in order to achieve some sort of brass ring that usually involves people feeling some way about you – I mean, people wonder why we walk around feeling alienated and lonely and stressed out.”
― David Foster Wallace

“Death doesn't exist. It never did, it never will. But we've drawn so many pictures of it, so many years, trying to pin it down, comprehend it, we've got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy. All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness. Nothing.”
― Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

“From day one it was like society was this violent, complicated dance and everybody had taken lessons but me. Knocked to the floor again, climbing to my feet each time, bloody and humiliated. Always met with disapproving faces, waiting for me to leave so I'd stop fucking up the party.

The wanted to push me outside, where the freaks huddled in the cold. Out there with the misfits, the broken, the glazed-eye types who can only watch as the normals enjoy their shiny new cars and careers and marriages and vacations with the kids.

The freaks spend their lives shambling around, wondering how they got left out, mumbling about conspiracy theories and bigfoot sightings. Their encounters with the world are marked by awkward conversations and stifled laughter, hidden smirks and rolled eyes. And worst of all, pity.”
― David Wong, John Dies at the End

“Good literature is a mirror through which we see ourselves more clearly.”
― Mark Frost, The Secret History of Twin Peaks

“Why am I telling you this?" he went on. "A secret's only a secret as long as you keep it. Once you tell someone it loses all its power--for good or for ill--like that, it's just another piece of information. But a real mystery can't be solved, not completely. It's always just out of reach, like a light around the corner; you might catch a glimpse of what it reveals, feel its warmth, but you can't know the heart of it, not really. That's what gives it value: It can't be cracked, it's bigger than you and me, bigger than everything we know. Those tight-ass suits can keep their secrets, they don't add up to anything. This deep in the game, pal, I'll take mystery every time.”
― Mark Frost, The Secret History of Twin Peaks

“A core fundamental of human existence is wonder—and its analogue is fear. You can’t have one without the other, flip sides of the coin.”
― Mark Frost, Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier

“And even as we 'wonder' at what we're doing here, so do we also fear-- so deep down below the surface of our lives that few can bear to look at it-- that life is a meaningless jest, an extravagant exercise in morbidity, a tale of sorrow and suffering lit by flashes, and made bearable only by moments of companionship and unsustainable joy. Along the way, as we struggle to come to terms and comprehend why this strange fate has befallen us, time becomes no longer our ally-- the spendthrift assumption of our youth-- but our executioner. It all feels at times like a merciless joke made at our expense, without our consent.”
― Mark Frost, Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier

“Imagination was a cancer of the heart. All those lives you carried around in your head that you wouldn’t ever get to live—they filled you up until you couldn’t breathe.”
― Joe Hill, Strange Weather

“Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only—if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn’t it? And isn’t the whole point of things—beautiful things—that they connect you to some larger beauty?”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don’t get to choose our own hearts. We can’t make ourselves want what’s good for us or what’s good for other people. We don’t get to choose the people we are.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“That life - whatever else it is - is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“Well—I have to say I personally have never drawn such a sharp line between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ as you. For me: that line is often false. The two are never disconnected. One can’t exist without the other. As long as I am acting out of love, I feel I am doing best I know how. But you—wrapped up in judgment, always regretting the past, cursing yourself, blaming yourself, asking ‘what if,’ ‘what if.’ ‘Life is cruel.’ ‘I wish I had died instead of.’ Well—think about this. What if all your actions and choices, good or bad, make no difference to God? What if the pattern is pre-set? No no—hang on—this is a question worth struggling with. What if our badness and mistakes are the very thing that set our fate and bring us round to good? What if, for some of us, we can’t get there any other way?”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“Sometimes it's about playing a poor hand well.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“We looked at each other. And it occurred to me that despite his faults, which were numerous and spectacular, the reason I’d liked Boris and felt happy around him from almost the moment I’d met him was that he was never afraid. You didn’t meet many people who moved freely through the world with such a vigorous contempt for it and at the same time such oddball and unthwartable faith in what, in childhood, he had liked to call “the Planet of Earth.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“Hey," said Shadow. "Huginn or Muninn, or whoever you are."
The bird turned, head tipped, suspiciously, on one side, and it stared at him with bright eyes.
"Say 'Nevermore,'" said Shadow.
"Fuck you," said the raven.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“People believe, thought Shadow. It's what people do. They believe, and then they do not take responsibility for their beliefs; they conjure things, and do not trust the conjuration. People populate the darkness; with ghosts, with gods, with electrons, with tales. People imagine, and people believe; and it is that rock solid belief, that makes things happen.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“A song isn't a commercial for an album. It isn't a tool to build name awareness or reinforce your brand. A song is a bullet that can shatter your chains.”
― Grady Hendrix, We Sold Our Souls

“West Virginia was a haunted house. Grocery stores sat dark, empty diners stared out from blank windows, farmhouses collapsed beside the highway like rotten teeth.”
― Grady Hendrix, We Sold Our Souls