Quotes from Mark Z. Danielewski

even as instinct commands me to run. But by then it will already be too late. The distance far too great to cover. As if there ever really was a place to hide.

leaving me with absolutely no sound way to determine where the hell I'm going, though right now going to hell seems like a pretty sound bet.

When it is a matter of nature, we rarely find ourselves on familiar ground. At every step, there is something that humiliates and mortifies proud minds

Here then—the aftermath of meaning.

But he does seem to have leveled out, not exactly achieving some sublime moment of clarity but at least attaining a certain degree of self-control.

His eyes remain fixed on a horizon that is both empty and meaningless.

There is something eerie about the odd stillness that settles on the living room then . . . It is as if this scene has been impossibly fixed and will never change again.

But here it is. All that's left. Incoherent scrap. Too bad so much of his life had to slip between the lines of even his own words.

a story I've already lived and really don't need to retell here.

Tom drifting into an unremarkable and for the most part internal existence.

This is what it feels like to be really afraid. Though of course it doesn't. None of this can truly approach the reality of that fear, there in the midst of all that bedlam, like the sound of a heart or some other unholy blast, desperate & dying, slamming, no banging into the thin wall of my inner ear, paper thin in fact, attempting to shatter inside what had already been shattered long ago. I should be dead. Why am I still here?

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.

I constantly craved the comforts of feminine attention, even though the thought of actually getting a girlfriend, one who was into me and wanted to be with me, seemed about as real as any dozen of the myths I'd been reading about in class.

He is clearly exhausted, dehydrated, and perhaps a little unable to believe he has actually escaped the maze.

On one hand transcendent and lasting and on the other violent and extremely flammable.

Something forever watchful has taken up residence in his eyes.

La maison de Navidson peut-elle exister sans qu'on en fasse l'expérience ?

All this time I'd believed the cavorting and drinking and sex had done away with that terrible onslaught of fear. Clearly I was wrong. I'd only pushed it off into another place.

In many ways, Navidson's house functions like an immense isolation tank. Deprived of light, change in temperature and any sense of time, the individual begins to create his own sensory [ ], [ ]d depen[ ]ng on the duration of his stay begins to project more and more of [ ] personality on those bare walls and vacant []allways.

Perhaps one reason Navidson became so enamoured with photography was the way it gave permanence to moments that were often so fleeting.

Accepting his analysis hardly altered the way I felt.

You know this is still the simple answer. I guess the complicated one I don't feel like getting into.

The thought that I'd frightened someone I felt only tenderness for made it far worse.

I'm alone. That just figures. Ghosts always go first for the one who's alone. In fact, I bet they're here right now. Lurking.