William Stribling

“In the movies, people almost never talked about the towns they spent their lives in; they ran around having adventures and never stopped to get their bearings. It was weird, when you thought about it. They only remembered where they were from if they wanted to complain about how awful it was there, or, later, to remember it as a place of infinite promise, a place whose light had been hidden from them until it became unrecoverable, at which point its gleam would become impossible to resist.”
― John Darnielle, Universal Harvester

“Here and there, alone, reflecting, I’d bump up against what felt like a buffer zone between me and some vast reserve of grief, but its reinforcements were sturdy enough and its construction solid enough to prevent me from really ever smelling its air, feeling its wind on my face.”
― John Darnielle, Wolf in White Van

“Trying to explain the feeling I had is like trying to describe what you see when your eyes are bandaged: it’s not impossible, but it’s different from describing something you can actually look at, something you might see in the course of a normal day. It is trying to describe something at which you are unable to look directly.”
― John Darnielle, Wolf in White Van

“There is no identifiable accent here unless you’ve cultivated a very careful ear. This is an easy place to live, milder in feel than Nebraska to the west, negligibly warmer in the winter than Minnesota to the north, of less imagined consequence to the world than Illinois to the east or Missouri to the south.”
― John Darnielle, Universal Harvester