Mark Z. Danielewski Quotes

Here then at long last is my darkness. No cry of light, no glimmer, not even the faintest shard of hope to break free across the hold.

Keep true to the rare music in your heart, to the marvelous and unique form that is and shall always be nothing else but you. Keep to that and you can do no wrong, which I realize is easier said than done.

Youth always tries to fill the void, an old man learns to live with it.

Passion has little to do with euphoria and everything to do with patience. It is not about feeling good. It is about endurance. Like patience, passion comes from the same Latin root: pati. It does not mean to flow with exuberance. It means to suffer.

Have no fear, you will find your way. It's in your bones. It's in your soul.

Maturity, one discovers, has everything to do with the acceptance of ‘not knowing.

I want something else. I'm not even sure what to call it anymore except I know it feels roomy and it's drenched in sunlight and it's weightless and I know it's not cheap. Probably not even real

Losing the possibility of something is the exact same thing as losing hope and without hope nothing can survive.

Little solace comes to those who grieve when thoughts keep drifting as walls keep shifting and this great blue world of ours seems a house of leaves moments before the wind.

We all create stories to protect ourselves.

I do not know anything about Art with a capital A. What I do know about is my art. Because it concerns me. I do not speak for others. So I do not speak for things which profess to speak for others. My art, however, speaks for me. It lights my way.

Knowledge is hot water on wool. It shrinks time and space.

Who has never killed an hour?

Her smile, I'm sure, burnt Rome to the ground.

My hands resemble some ancient tree: the roots that bind up the earth, the rock and the ceaselessly nibbling wordms.

...she still cannot resist looking out the window every couple of minutes. The sound of a passing truck causes her to glance away. Even if there is no sound, the weight of a hundred seconds always turns her head.

You shall be my roots and I will be your shade, though the sun burns my leaves. You shall quench my thirst and I will feed you fruit, though time takes my seed. And when I'm lost and can tell nothing of this earth you will give me hope. And my voice you will always hear. And my hand you will always have. For I will shelter you. And I will comfort you. And even when we are nothing left, not even in death, I will remember you.

I took my morning walk, I took my evening walk, I ate something, I thought about something, I wrote, I napped and dreamt something too, and with all that something, I still have nothing because so much of sum’thing has always been and always will be you.

At the heart of any terror is the fear of losing what we find meaningful.

Because the enormous narcissism of their parents deprived Will and Tom of suitable role models, both brothers learned to identify with absence. Consequently, even if something beneficial fortuitously entered their lives they immediately treated it as temporary. By the time they were teenagers they were already accustomed to a discontinuous lifestyle marked by constant threats of abandonment and the lack of any emotional stability. Unfortunately, "accustomed to" here is really synonymous with "damaged by.

People frequently comment on the emptiness in one night stands, but emptiness here has always been just another word for darkness. Blind encounters writing sonnets no one can ever read. Desire and pain communicated in the vague language of sex. None of which made sense to me until much later when I realized everything I thought I'd retained of my encounters added up to so very little, hardly enduring, just shadows of love outlining nothing at all.

This great blue world of ours is but a house of leaves, moments before the wind.

Even the brightest magnesium flare can do little against such dark except blind the eyes of the one holding it. Thus one craves what by seeing one has in fact not seen.

The ruminations are mine, let the world be yours.

Stories heard but not recalled. Letters too. Words filling my head. Fragmenting like artillery shells. Shrapnel, like syllables, flying everywhere. Terrible syllables. Sharp cracked. Traveling at murderous speed. Tearing through it all in a very, very bad inreparable way.

Scars are the paler pain of survival received unwillingly and displayed in the language of injury.

Sublime is something you choke on after a shot of tequila.

Heart may still be the fire in hearth but I'm suddenly too cold to continue, and besides, there's no hearth here anyway and it's the end of June. Thursday. Almost noon. And all the buttons on my corduroy coat are gone. I don't know why. I'm sorry Hailey. I don't know what to do.

For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You'll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you'll realize it's always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won't understand why or how.

And where there is no Echo there is no description of space or love. There is only silence.

Everyone loves the Dream but I kill it.

He [Zampano] probably would of insisted on corrections and edits, he was his own harshest critic, but I've come to believe errors, especially written errors, are often the only markers left by a solitary life: to sacrifice them is to lose the angels of personality, the riddle of a soul. In this case a very old soul. A very old riddle.

Through all the windows I only see infinity.

No gunfire, famine, or flies. Just lots of toothpaste, gardening and people stuff.

Quick note here: if this crush-slash-swooning stuff is hard for you to stomach, if youve never had a similar experience, then you should come to grips with the fact that youve got a TV dinner for a heart and might want to consider climbing inside a microwave and turning it on high for at least an hour, which if you do consider only goes to show what kind of idiot you truly are because microwaves are way too small for anyone, let alone you, to climb into.

Prometheus, thief of light, giver of light, bound by the gods, must have been a book.

So often I wonder whether it is my right to capitalize, as I feel, so often, on the grief of others. But then I justify, in my own particular thoughts, by feeling that I can contribute a little to the understanding of what others are going through; then there is reason for doing it.

Write what you love. Love will hold you through the hard times and hold the world during the good times.

Some people reflect light, some deflect it, you by some miracle, seem to collect it.

Back on shore everyone was pretty messed up, but the owner/captain was by far the worst off. He ended up drunk for a week, though the only thing he ever said was "So?" The boat's gone. "So?" Your mate's dead. "So?" Hey at least you're alive. "So?" An awful word but it does harden you. It hardened me.

Scientists estimate the universe unfolded from its state of infinite destiny* - a moment commonly referred to as "the big bang" - approximately 1.3-2 x 10^10 years ago. *Typo: "destiny" should read "density.

Do not wake me from this slumber, but be assured that just as I have wept much, I have also wandered many roads with my thoughts.

House of Leaves is certainly about the unsettling nature of fear - and it was my aim to address that - but its also about recovering from fear.

Love of love written by the broken hearted, love of life written by the dead.

Why did god create a dual universe? So he might say ‘Be not like me. I am alone.' And it might be heard.

Even the closest relationships that I have I know could potentially fall away. That's not to speak pessimistically or negatively about those relationships. In a weird way, it's the opposite. I value them.

I still get nightmares. In fact, I get them so often I should be used to them by now. I'm not. No one ever really gets used to nightmares.

I think that's what finally stopped me. I slid right to the edge. My legs were hanging over. And I could feel it too. I don't know how. There was no wind, no sound, no change of temperature. There was just this terrible emptiness reaching up for me.

Tom gets by, Navidson succeeds. Tom just wants to be, Navidson must become. And yet despite such obvious differences, anyone who looks past Tom's wide grin and considers his eyes will find surprisingly deep pools of sorrow. Which is how we know they are brothers, because like Tom, Navidson's eyes share the same water.

At the breakfast table we are footnoting everything that we read. We don't recognise it as such but we encounter an article in the newspaper and then suddenly we recall that a friend had a certain comment on that particular story, a certain bit of news that we saw on the television applies to that and we immediately assemble an idea of a story.