Top 100 Mark Z. Danielewski Quotes
#1. 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.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#4. 'House of Leaves' is certainly about the unsettling nature of fear - and it was my aim to address that - but it's also about recovering from fear.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#5. But tomorrow came faster than expected, as if the future were never somewhere else, but all along part of the fabric of every present, merely untwining itself again and again into a new distinction that could never be new again.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#6. No gunfire, famine, or flies. Just lots of toothpaste, gardening and people stuff.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#8. 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.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#9. Unoccupied space will never cease to change simply because nothing forbids it to do so.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#10. I'm so tired. Sleep's been stalking me for too long to remember. Inevitable I suppose.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#11. Anger is one way to respond to fear. I say one way because responses are categorically multiple.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#12. Maturity, one discovers, has everything to do with the acceptance of 'not knowing.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#13. Literature is capable of being a subject that people want to catch up on or discuss, whether at a coffee shop or a watercooler. It can become an intrinsic part of their dialogue.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#16. - Whenever we roam be beside me.
When you're allone. When you go.
When no one comes along. And for all we
Wander. Encounter and open
Allways curl up with me.
Give me pain, past and fury.
Betray my way. I won't abandon you.-
Mark Z. Danielewski
#17. You wouldn't believe how much harder it's getting for me to just leave my studio. It's really sad. In fact these days the only thing that gets me outside is when I say: Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck you. Fuck me. Fuck this. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#19. 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.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#20. 'Lord of the Rings' was a set of books in which the world had been conceived before the characters were placed within that context.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#21. Sometimes it's just silent ... No sound at all.
'Does that scare you?'
Chad nods.
'Why?' asks his father.
'It's like something's waiting.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#22. ...recogniz[ing] the dangerous influence the unknown naturally has on everyone." P.60
Mark Z. Danielewski
#24. Hopefully you'll be able to make sense of what I can represent though still fail to understand.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#25. Here then - the after math of meaning. A liftime finished between the space of two frames.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#26. Get thee to a dictionary and be relentless about your visits there. p. 591
Mark Z. Danielewski
#27. 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.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#28. Look to the sky, look to yourself and remember: we are only God's echoes and God is Narcissus.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#29. 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.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#30. The greatest love letters are always encoded for the one and not the many.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#31. Since when did you bring a gun?" Navidson asks, crouching near the door.
"Are you kidding me? This place is scary.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#32. Not all complex problems have easy solutions; so says science (so warns science.)
Mark Z. Danielewski
#33. Explanation is not half as strong as experience but experience is not half as strong as experience and understanding
Mark Z. Danielewski
#34. Which in the gray of gentler eyes will prove far more than any of us could ever need; 'enough' we will shout, 'enough!' our bellies full, our hearts full, our ages full; fullness and greater fullness and even more fullness; how then we will laugh and forget how imagining has already left us.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#35. The world only mattered because people lived there and sometimes, in spite of the pain, tragedy, and degradation, even managed to triumph there.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#37. Words need worlds in order to be worlds. worlds though don't need words in order to be worlds.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#39. Make no mistake, those who write long books have nothing to say.
Of course those who write short books have even less to say.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#40. All I hope for is one moment of rational thought and a shot at action before I'm lost to a great saddening madness, pithed at the hands of my own stumbling biology.
[Johnny Truant]
Mark Z. Danielewski
#41. Losing the possibility of something is the exact same thing as losing hope and without hope nothing can survive.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#42. Very soon he will vanish completely in the wings of his own wordless stanza. [ ] but his stanza is not completely empty [ * ]
Mark Z. Danielewski
#43. The finest act of seeing is necessarily always the act of not seeing something else.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#46. My interest is in how meaning is communicated via language, and I believe the shape, positioning, even the color of the language has an effect on meaning.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#47. 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.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#48. Irony? Irony can never be more than our own personal Maginot line; the drawing of it, for the most part, purely arbitrary.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#49. Also remember, love inhabits more than just the heart and mind. If need be it can take shelter in a big toe.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#50. I'm a big believer in big books, and that doesn't necessarily mean long books.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#51. 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 angles of personality, the riddle of a soul. In this case a very old soul. A very old riddle.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#52. You got a death wish, Truant?' Which was the thing that scared me. 'Cause maybe I did.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#53. Prometheus, thief of light, giver of light, bound by the gods, must have been a book.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#54. The greatest of love letters are always coded for the one and not the many.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#55. Wake & Bake. More like Wash & Bake. Half a bowl of cereal and a shot of bourbon later, I'm there, my friendly haze having finally arrived. I'm ready for work.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#56. Beautiful women are always drawn to men they think will keep them beautiful.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#57. I had one woman come up to me in a bookstore and say, 'You know, everyone told me it was a horror book, but when I finished it, I realized that it was a love story.' And she's absolutely right. In some ways, genre is a marketing tool.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#60. 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.
I miss you.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#61. Come morning I found the day as I have found every other day
without relief or explanation.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#63. 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.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#64. Of course real horror does not depend upon the melodrama of shadows or even the conspiracies of night.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#65. I believe the structure of 'House of Leaves' is far more difficult to explain than it is to read. And while I'd like to lay claim to some extraordinary act of originality, truth is I'm only taking advantage of capabilities inherent in everyone.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#66. What can I say, I'm a sucker for abandoned stuff, misplaced stuff, forgotten stuff, any old stuff which despite the light of progress and all that, still vanishes every day like shadows at noon, goings unheralded, passings unourned, well, you get the drift.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#67. My hands resemble some ancient tree: the roots that bind up the earth, the rock and the ceaselessly nibbling wordms.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#70. 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.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#73. 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.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#76. Absolutely nothing visible to the eye provides a reason for or even evidence of those terrifying shifts which can in a matter of moments reconstitute a simple path into an extremely complicated one.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#77. Do we miss not only the past but every future the lost past describes? Is that just the nature of missing? All the lost might-have-beens? The certainty that those uncertain futures are gone? If we can't embrace uncertainty do we miss the point of love?
Mark Z. Danielewski
#78. 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.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#79. Darkness is impossible to remember. Consequently cavers desire to return to those unseen depths where they have just been. It is an addiction. No one is ever satisfied. Darkness never satisfies. Especially if it takes something away which it almost always invariably does.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#81. At the heart of any terror is the fear of losing what we find meaningful.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#82. Both pieces are similar in one way:what one could believe, one doubts. Nicoise because one depends upon the moral sense of the filmmaker, The Navidson Record because one depends upon the moral sense of the world.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#83. I live at the end of some interminable corridor which the lucky damned can call hell but which the much unluckier atheists - and your mother heads up that bunch- must simply get used to calling home.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#85. 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.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#86. 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.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#87. To repeat: her voice has life. It possesses a quality not present in the original, revealing how a nymph can return a different and more meaningful story, in spite of telling the same story.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#88. I could see her get all nervous but she was also excited. Nightmares have that quality, don't they?
Mark Z. Danielewski
#89. Love of love written by the broken hearted, love of life written by the dead.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#90. Write what you love. Love will hold you through the hard times and hold the world during the good times.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#91. How do we remember this emptiness so in fullness we won't forget?' Asked once, when emptiness was the worst. Why ever [would] he want to remember that?
Mark Z. Danielewski
#92. If not, let me offer you some instruction in at least one area: get thee to a dictionary and be relentless about your visits there.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#93. 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. It's probably not even real.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#94. What miracle is this? This giant tree.
It stands ten thousand feet high
But doesn't reach the ground. Still it stands.
Its roots must hold the sky.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#96. And where there is no Echo there is no description of space or love. There is only silence.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#97. Why did god create a dual universe?
So he might say
'Be not like me. I am alone.'
And it might be heard.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#99. My dear girl, is it that you are so lonely that you had to create this?
Mark Z. Danielewski
#100. Symbols shmimbols. Sure they're important but ... Well look at Ahab's whale. Now there's a great symbol. Some say it stands for god, meaning, and purpose. Others say it stands for purposelessness and the void. But what we sometimes forget is that Ahab's whale was also just a whale.
Mark Z. Danielewski
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