David Vann Quotes

#1. You know you're going to have a good day when your morning begins with breakfast in the same room as Carrie Tiffany, David Vann and Lionel Shriver.

Hannah Kent

#2. We're not supposed to touch the dead. This is why we make a comfortable afterlife for them, so they will not reach out. We hope to distract them, keep them busy. Burial is a hope.

David Vann

#3. There can be no god without desire.

David Vann

#4. There must be at least one god not filled with rage.

David Vann

#5. The dead reaching for us, needing us, but this isn't true. There's only us reaching for them, trying to find ourselves.

David Vann

#6. She has done this for Jason and will do more, she knows. Her brother dismembered at her feet. This is how the world begins.

David Vann

#7. She had made him into a kind of husband,her own son.

David Vann

#8. Cutting through layers,this labor like cutting through the illusion of self to find there was no core, only the layers.

David Vann

#9. What would it feel like to be ravished by a god, to hold a deity.

David Vann

#10. This table felt extremely dangerous. He understood now that what held his family together was violence.

David Vann

#11. What's the point of sea horses? I asked.
The old man stood before them, mouth hung open, as if before his god.

David Vann

#12. If you look at something in the distance long enough, you eventually have to go there.

David Vann

#13. Born to destroy kings, born to reshape the world, born to horrify and break and remake, born to endure and never be erased. Hekate Medea, more than god and more than woman, alive now, in the time of origin.

David Vann

#14. What would the world be like if men never ruled again?

David Vann

#15. the best choice we have on the menu tonight.

David Vann

#16. This is what I've always loved about a city, all the worlds hidden away inside, largest of aquariums.

David Vann

#17. One life can never know another's.

David Vann

#18. Even now, I still believe metamorphosis is the greatest beauty.

David Vann

#19. The worst part of childhood is not knowing that bad things pass, that time passes. A terrible moment in childhood hovers with s kind of eternity, unbearable.

David Vann

#20. That night longer than all my life before it. No scale or measure in this world can ever be held constant. We are always slipping.

David Vann

#21. That's true. It doesn't make any sense. Welcome to the adult world, coming soon. I work so I can work more. I try not to want anything so maybe I'll get something. I starve so I can be less and more. I try to be free so I can be alone. And there's no point to any of it. They left out that part.

David Vann

#22. Origins...They don't explain us, you know. They never do. Each of us is our own piece of work.

David Vann

#23. A change in those moments, some switch turned off forever, the end of trust or safety or love, and how do we ever find the switch again?

David Vann

#24. If enough people repeat the stories for long enough, Jason will become something that cannot die, but he also will have been erased, because the actions are too large and impersonal. The stories will reveal nothing about the real man who lived.

David Vann

#25. Medea is without words, without thought. She has unstrung the world, pulled some vital thread and unraveled all. Nothing to do now but hold her breath and find out whether a new world re-forms.

David Vann

#26. Anything is possible with a parent. Parents are gods. They make us and they destroy us. They warp the world and remake it in their own shape, and that's the world we know forever after. It's the only world. We can't see what it might have looked like otherwise.

David Vann

#27. Why can't any common fuck be king?

David Vann

#28. The point was the struggle. The earth thickened here so that he would labor. The shovel felt heavy so that he could feel he was doing something. The world provided resistance, and as we struggled through, we learned our final lessons.

David Vann

#29. Absurdity is all that makes grief bearable

David Vann

#30. There are no gods, only men.

David Vann

#31. Each one a little bit different but following some blueprint somewhere. As if each of us might have a blueprint. As if somewhere there's the shape of my life, and I had the chance to choose a few variations, but not far from the pattern.

David Vann

#32. Each thing that happens to us, each and every thing, it leaves some dent, and that dent will always be there. Each of us is a walking wreck.

David Vann

#33. Because you can choose who you'll be with, but you can't choose who they'll become.

David Vann

#34. What myth can hold when you kneel in your brother's remains? When you slit his throat yourself? What story can guide us if we can betray all?

David Vann

#35. I thought that was a wonderful idea, that one could be on hell without being in it, like "Just Visiting" on the Monopoly board.

David Vann

#36. And only men could have invented the idea of a king.

David Vann

#37. Having something to look forward to changes everything. I've always needed a future. I can't live without one.

David Vann

#38. We live through evolution ourselves, each of us, progressing through different apprehensions of the world, at each age forgetting the last age, every previous mind erased. We no longer see the same world at all.

David Vann

#39. If it had lips, we'd feel closer to it. All we need are eyes and lips, apparently, and we think we can say hello. I don't think I realized that before, how much we need the world to look like us.

David Vann

#40. Maybe this is as near as we can come to forgiveness. Not the past wiped away, nothing undone, but some willingness in the present, some recognition and embrace and slowing down.

David Vann