When I became conscious of being a person, when I was very small, I knew that I was from Indiana, but I had never seen Indiana. I was born there, but we moved when I was, like, a year old. I always had a sense of a place that was far away from where I was. I would research it and find out about it and I remember on Christmas morning I used to always call Indiana to find out what the weather was like; to see if it was snowing or not.
John DarnielleGender relations are a sad story of men talking trash about women all over the world.
John DarnielleIt usually happens that I have multiple different projects going on at once, and one can be referencing the other.
John DarnielleDiagnoses exist to help get people services they need - but there's no such thing as mental illness. We're all mentally ill.
John DarnielleEverybody is in various states of needing to transcend something. I believe in mental health care, but when we call people "crazy," we exclude them from our circle.
John DarnielleI think grief is a huge subject; it's one of the things that everybody is going to confront in one way or another. There's been a lot of books written about how Americans have an odd way of trying to defer grief or minimize the need to grieve. People used to have a lot more ritual grief in their lives. For the most part, we think of it as a strictly temporal process: you grieve for a time and then you're over [it], but it's also a spatial process. It travels across a map.
John Darnielle