Quotes from Mark Z. Danielewski

FUCK. A great by-the-bootstrap prayer or curse of you prefer, depending on how you look at it, or use it, suited perfectly for hurling at the skies or at the world, or sometimes, if said just right, for uttering with enough love and fire, the woman beside you melts inside herself

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.

Just a glance at the ragged mess around her fingernails communicated more than the lenghiest essays on the nature of distress.

Irony? Irony can never be more than our own personal Maginot line; the drawing of it, for the most part, purely arbitrary.

Love's love in her blackest season.

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.

Å¿tairs! We haue found Å¿tairs!

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]

People frequently comment on the emptiness in one night stands, but emptiness here has always been just another word for darkness. Blind encounters writing sonnets no one can ever read. Desire and pain communicated in the vague language of sex

You have to let the water run awhile and even though it remains icy, part of you still refuses to believe it won´t change, especially if you wait a little longer or open up the valve a little more. So you wait but no matter how many minutes run by, you still see no steam, you still feel no heat.

How easily she finds the impossible in the ordinary.

The world only mattered because people lived there and sometimes, in spite of the pain, tragedy, and degradation, even managed to triumph there.

You could not believe what one sigh articulates. What one laugh creates.

Even up until these final eons of time, we felt we could create anything. We could build ourselves a heaven. But why? We were Heaven already. Only in the very end did we try to build a S.O.U.L. That which would outlast V.E.M., outlast The Verse, outlast death. But it was impossible. Or we were too late. Though still the H.O.L.Y. tried. And built Hell instead.

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.

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.

There's only one choice now: finish what Zampanò himself failed to finish. Re-inter this thing in a binding tomb. Make it only a book.

Death, it turns out, is the mother of all conflicts.

Aside from recurrance, revision, and commensurate symbolic reference, echoes also reveal emptiness. Since objects always impede acoustic reflection, only empty places can create echoes of lasting clarity.

Immensely clever story, and quite creepy, in a delightfully scary way.

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.

What did God really know about brothers (or for that matter sisters)? He was after all an only child and before it all an equally lonely father.

At least when you're drunk, Tom adds, quickly wiping the wet from his face. You've always got the floor for your best friend. Know why? It's always there for you, Navidson answers, his own cheeks suddenly flushing with emotion as he helps his weaving brother to the kitchen. That's right, Tom whispers. Just like you.

Not only had Navidson carried Karen out of that house, he had picked her up a hundred times over the course of eleven years and carried her fear, her torment, and her distance.