Quotes from Mark Z. Danielewski

leaving those on board with no place else to go.

Maybe I've said that already. Doesn't matter. Where she's concerned I'm happy to repeat myself.

I'm seeing now, not remembering but something else . . .

For as we know, there cannot be an escape.

hearing their death before the actual impact reverberates through the hull—and there never really had been time for lifeboats . . .

I'm too far from here to know anything or anyone anymore. I don't even know myself.

She was just looking straight at me, and without any malice either. She was wide open, taking in everything I told her without judgement, just listening, listening to the way I phrased it all, listening to how I felt.

Where one might expect horror, the supernatural, or traditional paroxysms of dread and fear, one discovers disturbing sadness . . .

A mockery of meaning where meaning had never been needed before.

Hello? That was the first word she ever said to me in the Shop. Not like Hi either. More like Hello, is anyone home? hence the question mark. I wasn't even looking at her when she said it, just staring blankly down at my equally blank pad of tracing paper, probably thinking something similar to all those ridiculous, sappy thoughts I just now recounted, about road trips and forest fires and motorcycles, remembering her, even though she was right there in front of me, only a few feet away.

It looks like its impossible to leave a lasting trace here.

Some critics believe the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it.

And to tell you the truth I was never sure I was going to make it until I finally did.

The house, the halls, and the rooms all become the self—collapsing, expanding, tilting, closing, but always in perfect relation to the mental state of the individual.

I had trouble just walking out my door. Things are definitely deteriorating. Even reaching for the latch made me feel sick to my stomach.

It is a justice forever informed by the deepest kind of agony.

I'm losing any sense of who he was, no name, no history, only the awful panic he felt, universal to us all.

I had fallen in love with her, flash of gold and sunlight and Rome.

Another small mystery to muse over, if you like, or just forget, which I recommend.

All I could hold but in the end not save. Of course I lost everything. I lost her number, I lost her, and then in a fugue of erasure, I lost the memory of her, so that by the time she called she was gone along with the kisses and the promise and all that hope.

There's only one choice and the brave make it. Fly from the path.

I know I am too late. I'm lost inside and no longer convinced there's a way out.

I should have turned around right then. I should have known something was up, at the very least sensed the consequence lingering in the air, in the hour, in Lude's stare, in all of it, and fuck, I must have been some kind of moron to have been so oblivious to all those signs.

No better book ends than two walls.