Mark Z. Danielewski Quotes

Love of love written by the broken hearted, love of life written by the dead.

~ Mark Z. Danielewski

...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.

~ Mark Z. Danielewski

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

~ Mark Z. Danielewski

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

~ Mark Z. Danielewski

In the end Navidson is left with one page and one match. For a long time he waits in darkness and cold, postponing this final bit of illumination. At last though, he grips the match by the neck and after locating the friction strip sparks to life a final ball of light.First, he reads a few lines by match light and then as the heat bites his fingertips he applies the flame to the page. Here then is one end: a final act of reading, a final act of consumption. And as the fire rapidly devours the paper, Navidson's eyes frantically sweep down over the text, keeping just ahead of the necessary immolation, until as he reaches the last few words, flames lick around his hands, ash peels off into the surrounding emptiness, and then as the fire retreats, dimming, its light suddenly spent, the book is gone leaving nothing behind but invisible traces already dismantled in the dark.

~ Mark Z. Danielewski

Then no matter where you are, in a crowded restaurant or on some desolate street or even in the comforts of your own home, you'll watch yourself dismantle every assurance you ever lived by. You'll stand aside as a great complexity intrudes, tearing apart, piece by piece, all your carefully conceived denials, whether deliberate or unconscious. And for better or worse you'll turn, unable to resist, though try to resist you still will, fighting with everything you've got not to face the thing you most dread, what is now, what will be, what has always come before, the creature you truly are, the creature we all are, buried in the nameless black of a name.And then the nightmares will begin.

~ Mark Z. Danielewski

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.

~ Mark Z. Danielewski

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.

~ Mark Z. Danielewski

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

~ Mark Z. Danielewski

I do not know anything about Art with a capital A. What I do know about is my art. Because it concerns me. I do not speak for others. So I do not speak for things which profess to speak for others. My art, however, speaks for me. It lights my way.

~ Mark Z. Danielewski

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.

~ Mark Z. Danielewski

Some people reflect lightSome deflect itYou by some miracleSeem to collect it

~ Mark Z. Danielewski

the seriousness of emotional deprivation:It is not difficult to understand how children who have suffered from malnutrition or starvation need food and plenty of care in their bodies are to recover so they can go on to lead normal lives. If, however, the starvation is severe enough, the damage will be permanent and they will suffer physical impairments for the rest of their lives. Likewise, children who are deprived of emotional nurturing require care and love if their sense of security and self-confidence is to be restored. However, if love is minimal and abuse high, the damage will be permanent and the children will suffer emotional impairments for the rest of their lives.

~ Mark Z. Danielewski

Do we miss not only the past but every future the lost past describes? Is that just the nature of missing? All the lost might-have-beens? The certainty that those uncertain futures are gone?

~ Mark Z. Danielewski

But tomorrow came faster than expected, as if the future were never somewhere else, but all along part of the fabric of every present, merely untwining itself again and again into a new distinction that could never be new again.

~ Mark Z. Danielewski

Your eye will no longer linger on the light, it will no longer trace constellations. You'll care only about the darkness and you'll watch it for hours, for days, maybe even for years, trying in vain to believe you're some kind of indispensable, universe-appointed sentinel, as if just by looking you could actually keep it all at bay.

~ Mark Z. Danielewski

You wouldn't believe how much harder it's getting for me to just leave my studio. It's really sad. In fact these days the only thing that gets me outside is when I say: Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck you. Fuck me. Fuck this. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

~ Mark Z. Danielewski

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.

~ Mark Z. Danielewski

My dear girl, is it that you are so lonely that you had to create this?

~ Mark Z. Danielewski

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.

~ Mark Z. Danielewski

Of course there always will be darkness but I realize now something inhabits it. Historical or not. Sometimes it seems like a cat, the panther with its moon mad gait or a tiger with stripes of ash and eyes as wild as winter oceans. Sometimes it's the curve of a wrist or what's left of romance, still hiding in the drawer of some long lost nightstand or carefully drawn in the margins of an old discarded calendar. Sometimes it's even just a vapor trail speeding west, prophetic, over clouds aglow with dangerous light. Of course these are only images, my images, and in the end they're born out of something much more akin to a Voice, which though invisible to the eye and frequently unheard by even the ear still continues, day and night, year after year, to sweep through us all.

~ Mark Z. Danielewski

Even the brightest magnesium flare can do little against such dark except blind the eyes of the one holding it. Thus one craves what by seeing one has in fact not seen.

~ Mark Z. Danielewski

Darkness is impossible to remember. Consequently cavers desire to return to those unseen depths where they have just been. It is an addiction. No one is ever satisfied. Darkness never satisfies. Especially if it takes something away which it almost always invariably does.

~ Mark Z. Danielewski

Of course real horror does not depend upon the melodrama of shadows or even the conspiracies of night.

~ Mark Z. Danielewski

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

~ Mark Z. Danielewski

Maturity, one discovers, has everything to do with the acceptance of ‘not knowing.

~ Mark Z. Danielewski

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

~ Mark Z. Danielewski

Her smile, I'm sure, burnt Rome to the ground.

~ Mark Z. Danielewski

I went outside. Tried taking in the billions of stars above, lingering long enough to allow each point of light the chance to scratch a deep hole in the back of my retina, so that when I finally did turn to face the dark surrounding forest I thought I saw the billion eyes of a billion cats blinking out, in the math of the living, the sum of the universe, the stories of history , a life older than anyone could have ever imagined. And even after they were gone--fading away together, as if they really were one--something still lingered in those sweet folds of black pine , sitting quietly, almost as if it too were waiting for something to wake.

~ Mark Z. Danielewski

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

~ Mark Z. Danielewski

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

~ Mark Z. Danielewski

Quick note here: if this crush-slash-swooning stuff is hard for you to stomach; if you’ve never had a similar experience, then you should come to grips with the fact that you’ve got a TV dinner for a heart and might want to consider climbing inside a microwave and turning it on high for at least an hour, which if you do consider only goes to show what kind of idiot you truly are because microwaves are way too small for anyone, let alone you, to climb into.

~ Mark Z. Danielewski

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

~ Mark Z. Danielewski

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. It’s probably not even real.

~ Mark Z. Danielewski

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

~ Mark Z. Danielewski

What is boredom? Endless repetitions, like, for example, Navidson’s corridors and rooms, which are consistently devoid of any Myst-like discoveries thus causing us to lose interest. What then makes anything exciting? Or better yet: what is exciting? While the degree varies, we are always excited by anything that engages us, influences us or more simply involves us. In those endlessly repetitive hallways and stairs, there is nothing for us to connect with. That permanently foreign place does not excite us. It bores us. And that is that, except for the fact that there is no such thing as boredom. Boredom is really a psychic defense protecting us from ourselves, from complete paralysis, by repressing, among other things, the meaning of that place, which in this case is and always has been horror.

~ Mark Z. Danielewski

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

~ Mark Z. Danielewski