Top 100 Danielewski Quotes
#1. I'm a big believer in big books, and that doesn't necessarily mean long books.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#2. Come morning I found the day as I have found every other day
without relief or explanation.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#3. 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
#6. 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
#7. Beautiful women are always drawn to men they think will keep them beautiful.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#8. 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
#9. The greatest of love letters are always coded for the one and not the many.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#10. One glance at her, even now in the glass of my mind, and I want to take off and travel with her.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#11. Prometheus, thief of light, giver of light, bound by the gods, must have been a book.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#12. You got a death wish, Truant?' Which was the thing that scared me. 'Cause maybe I did.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#13. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#22. The finest act of seeing is necessarily always the act of not seeing something else.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#24. Very soon he will vanish completely in the wings of his own wordless stanza. [ ] but his stanza is not completely empty [ * ]
Mark Z. Danielewski
#25. Losing the possibility of something is the exact same thing as losing hope and without hope nothing can survive.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#27. At the heart of any terror is the fear of losing what we find meaningful.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#32. Okay, you can be my slave.
My flying kick nicks his nose.
A warning. Worse if I weren't
succumbing to squeal.
What a feel.
I'm too multiple to feel.
A fork ahead.
I take both.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#33. 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
#34. 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
#37. 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
#38. He loved more than anything to fly. His sole conflict was with gravity.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#39. 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. 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
#44. My hands resemble some ancient tree: the roots that bind up the earth, the rock and the ceaselessly nibbling wordms.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. For some reason, I've been thinking more and more about my mother and the way her life failed her, humiliated her with impulses beyond her command, broke her with year after year of the same.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#48. Of course real horror does not depend upon the melodrama of shadows or even the conspiracies of night.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#49. 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
#51. Anger is one way to respond to fear. I say one way because responses are categorically multiple.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#53. '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
#54. 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
#56. 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
#57. - 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
#60. Of course curiosity killed the cat, and even if satisfaction supposedly brought it back, there's still that little problem with the man on the radio telling me more and more about some useless information.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#61. 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
#62. 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.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#63. Maturity, one discovers, has everything to do with the acceptance of 'not knowing.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#64. Some people reflect light, some deflect it, you by some miracle, seem to collect it.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#65. You're writing like a freshman.' And he replied- I remember this very distinctly: 'We always look for doctors but sometimes we're lucky to find a frosh.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#66. I'm so tired. Sleep's been stalking me for too long to remember. Inevitable I suppose.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#67. Unoccupied space will never cease to change simply because nothing forbids it to do so.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#68. 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
#70. No gunfire, famine, or flies. Just lots of toothpaste, gardening and people stuff.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#71. 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
#72. '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
#74. I miss u i love you
there's no second ive lived you can't call your own
Mark Z. Danielewski
#75. Immensely clever story, and quite creepy, in a delightfully scary way.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#76. Since when did you bring a gun?" Navidson asks, crouching near the door.
"Are you kidding me? This place is scary.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#77. And there you have it, another body on the floor surrounded by things that don't mean much to anyone except to the one who can't take any of them along.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#78. 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
#80. Words need worlds in order to be worlds. worlds though don't need words in order to be worlds.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. Explanation is not half as strong as experience but experience is not half as strong as experience and understanding
Mark Z. Danielewski
#85. Myth makes Echo the subject of longing and desire. Physics makes Echo the subject of distance and design. Where emotion and reason are concerned both claims are accurate. And where there is no Echo there is no description of space or love. There is only science.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#86. Maybe you saw her first? Caught a glimpse between the lines, between the letters, like a ghost in the mirror, a ghost in the wings?
Mark Z. Danielewski
#87. 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.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#88. Not all complex problems have easy solutions; so says science (so warns science.)
Mark Z. Danielewski
#89. 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
#90. The greatest love letters are always encoded for the one and not the many.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#91. 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
#92. Look to the sky, look to yourself and remember: we are only God's echoes and God is Narcissus.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#93. 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
#94. Get thee to a dictionary and be relentless about your visits there. p. 591
Mark Z. Danielewski
#95. Here then - the after math of meaning. A liftime finished between the space of two frames.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#96. Is it possible to love something so much, you imagine it wants to destroy you only because it has denied you?
Mark Z. Danielewski
#97. Hopefully you'll be able to make sense of what I can represent though still fail to understand.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#99. ...recogniz[ing] the dangerous influence the unknown naturally has on everyone." P.60
Mark Z. Danielewski
#100. 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
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