Mark Z. Danielewski Quotes

The greatest of love letters are always coded for the one and not the many.

The ruminations are mine, let the world be yours.

What miracle is this? This giant tree. It stands ten thousand feet high But doesn't reach the ground. Still it stands. Its roots must hold the sky.

Scars are the paler pain of survival received unwillingly and displayed in the language of injury.

Make no mistake, those who write long books have nothing to say. Of course those who write short books have even less to say.

Sublime is something you choke on after a shot of tequila.

The finest act of seeing is necessarily always the act of not seeing something else.

Scientists estimate the universe unfolded from its state of infinite destiny* - a moment commonly referred to as "the big bang" - approximately 1.3-2 x 10^10 years ago. *Typo: "destiny" should read "density.

Explanation is not half as strong as experience but experience is not half as strong as experience and understanding

Why did god create a dual universe? So he might say ‘Be not like me. I am alone.' And it might be heard.

You shall be my roots and I will be your shade, though the sun burns my leaves. You shall quench my thirst and I will feed you fruit, though time takes my seed. And when I'm lost and can tell nothing of this earth you will give me hope. And my voice you will always hear. And my hand you will always have. For I will shelter you. And I will comfort you. And even when we are nothing left, not even in death, I will remember you.

Maybe you saw her first? Caught a glimpse between the lines, between the letters, like a ghost in the mirror, a ghost in the wings?

For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You'll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you'll realize it's always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won't understand why or how.

Keep true to the rare music in your heart, to the marvelous and unique form that is and shall always be nothing else but you. Keep to that and you can do no wrong, which I realize is easier said than done.

Anger is one way to respond to fear. I say one way because responses are categorically multiple.

Do not wake me from this slumber, but be assured that just as I have wept much, I have also wandered many roads with my thoughts.

My interest is in how meaning is communicated via language, and I believe the shape, positioning, even the color of the language has an effect on meaning.

Heart may still be the fire in hearth but I'm suddenly too cold to continue, and besides, there's no hearth here anyway and it's the end of June. Thursday. Almost noon. And all the buttons on my corduroy coat are gone. I don't know why. I'm sorry Hailey. I don't know what to do.

I still get nightmares. In fact, I get them so often I should be used to them by now. I'm not. No one ever really gets used to nightmares.

I will walk heavy, and I will walk strange.

Physics depends on a universe infinitely centred on an equals sign.

I could see her get all nervous but she was also excited. Nightmares have that quality, don't they?

Because the enormous narcissism of their parents deprived Will and Tom of suitable role models, both brothers learned to identify with absence. Consequently, even if something beneficial fortuitously entered their lives they immediately treated it as temporary. By the time they were teenagers they were already accustomed to a discontinuous lifestyle marked by constant threats of abandonment and the lack of any emotional stability. Unfortunately, "accustomed to" here is really synonymous with "damaged by.

Some people reflect light, some deflect it, you by some miracle, seem to collect it.

Not all complex problems have easy solutions; so says science (so warns science.)

Come morning I found the day as I have found every other day--without relief or explanation.

I must read. I must read. I must read.

...and there you have it, another body on the floor surrounded by things that don't mean much to anyone except to the one who can't take any of them along.

It is hungry, it it immortal. Worse, it knows nothing of whim.

You got a death wish, Truant?' Which was the thing that scared me. 'Cause maybe I did.

Everyone loves the Dream but I kill it.

Here then - the after math of meaning. A liftime finished between the space of two frames.

The thread has snapped. No sound even to mark the breaking let alone the fall. That long anticipated disintegration, when the darkest angel of all, the horror beyond all horrors, sits at last upon my chest, permanently enfolding me in its great covering wings, black as ink, veined in Bees' purple. A creature without a voice. A voice without a name. As immortal as my life. Come here at long last to summon the wind.

Absolutely nothing visible to the eye provides a reason for or even evidence of those terrifying shifts which can in a matter of moments reconstitute a simple path into an extremely complicated one.

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

And where there is no Echo there is no description of space or love. There is only silence.

Knowledge is hot water on wool. It shrinks time and space.

Prometheus, thief of light, giver of light, bound by the gods, must have been a book.

This great blue world of ours is but a house of leaves, moments before the wind.

Passion has little to do with euphoria and everything to do with patience. It is not about feeling good. It is about endurance. Like patience, passion comes from the same Latin root: pati. It does not mean to flow with exuberance. It means to suffer.

Have no fear, you will find your way. It's in your bones. It's in your soul.

Sometimes it's just silent...No sound at all. 'Does that scare you?' Chad nods. 'Why?' asks his father. 'It's like something's waiting.

He [Zampano] probably would of insisted on corrections and edits, he was his own harshest critic, but I've come to believe errors, especially written errors, are often the only markers left by a solitary life: to sacrifice them is to lose the angels of personality, the riddle of a soul. In this case a very old soul. A very old riddle.

Stories heard but not recalled. Letters too. Words filling my head. Fragmenting like artillery shells. Shrapnel, like syllables, flying everywhere. Terrible syllables. Sharp cracked. Traveling at murderous speed. Tearing through it all in a very, very bad inreparable way.

Beautiful women are always drawn to men they think will keep them beautiful.

Here then at long last is my darkness. No cry of light, no glimmer, not even the faintest shard of hope to break free across the hold.

House of Leaves is certainly about the unsettling nature of fear - and it was my aim to address that - but its also about recovering from fear.

To read" actually comes from the Latin reri "to calculate, to think" which is not only the progenitor of "read" but of "reason" as well, both of which hail from the Greek arariskein "to fit." Aside from giving us "reason," arariskein also gives us an unlikely sibling, Latin arma meaning "weapons." It seems that "to fit" the world or to make sense of it requires either reason or arms.