Quotes from Big Fish

“When a man's stories are remembered, then he is immortal.”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish

“Dreams are what keep a man going.”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish

“The ending is always a surprise.”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish

“This is what is meant by last words: they are keys to unlock the afterlife. They're not last words but passwords, and as soon as they're spoken you can go.”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish

“You’re not necessarily supposed to believe it…You’re just supposed to believe in it.”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish

“Remembering a man's stories makes him immortal.”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish

“In the land of the dying, sentences go unfinished, you know how they're going to end.”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish

“He believed the stars were wishes, and that one day they would all come true.”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish

“We all have stories, just as you do. Ways in which he touched us, helped us, gave us money, sold it to us wholesale. Lots of stories, big and small. They all add up. Over a lifetime it all adds up. That's why we're here, William. We're a a part of him, who he is, just as he is a part of us. You still don't understand, do you?"
I didn't. But as I stared at the man and he stared back at me, in my father's dream I remembered where we'd met before.
"And what did my father do for you?" I asked him, and the old man smiled.
"He made me laugh," he said.”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish

“People were so cheap there... they ate beans to save on bubble bath.”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish

“What is it you say now, what peace is there to be made in the last minutes of the last day that will mark the before and after of your life until then, the day that will change everything for both of you, the living and the dead?”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish

“I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. He’s lived his whole life like a turtle, within an emotional carapace that makes for the perfect defense: there’s absolutely no way in. My hope is that in these last moments he’ll show me the vulnerable and tender underbelly of his self, but this isn’t happening, yet, and I’m a fool to think that it will. This is the way it has gone from the beginning: every time we get close to something meaningful, serious, or delicate, he tells a joke. There is a never a yes or no, what do you think, here, according to me, is the meaning of life. “Why”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish

“Still,” he says, “if I shared my doubts with you, about God and love and life and death, that’s all you’d have: a bunch of doubts. But now, see, you’ve got all these great jokes.” “They’re”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish

“The day Edward Bloom was born, it rained.”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish

“How can the world be seen at such speeds? Where do people need to go so badly they can't realize what is already here, outside the car window?”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish

“This is what is meant by last words: they are keys to unlock the afterlife. They’re not last words but passwords, and as soon as they’re spoken you can go.”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish

“Dying, he has that look dying people get in their eyes sometimes, happy and sad, tired and spiritually blessed, all at the same time.”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish

“You are a good dad,” I say. “Thanks,” he says, and his eyelids flutter a bit, as if he’s heard what he’s come to hear. This is what is meant by last words: they are keys to unlock the afterlife. They’re not last words but passwords, and as soon as they’re spoken you can go. “So.”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish

“He thought she hung the moon. He actually believed this from time to time. He believed the moon wouldn’t have been there but that she’d hung it. He believed the stars were wishes, and that one day they would all come true. For her, his daughter. He had told her this when she was little to make her happy, and now that he was old he believed it, because it made him happy and because he was so very old. He”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish

“I'd caught him at a bad time in his life. And this was no fault of his own. It was simply that the world no longer held the magic that allowed
him to live grandly within it.”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish

“My father is on the roof. This is how I remember him sometimes. Well-dressed in a dark suit and shiny, slippery shoes, he is looking left, looking right, looking as far as his eyes will travel. Then, looking down, he sees me, and just as he begins to fall he smiles, and winks. All the way down he's looking at me–smiling, mysterious, mythic, an unknown quantity: my dad.”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish

“The car is my father's magic carpet. Not only does it get him places, but it shows him places.”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish

“...because in my mind—in the memory that has lodged itself imperturbably in my mind, my father resembles Abraham Lincoln, a man with long arms and deep pockets and dark eyes...”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish

“He was a big fish, even then.”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish

“This wasn't life, of course. This was life support. This was what the medical world had fashioned to take the place of Purgatory.”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish

“...I'm not laughing. I'm not laughing at all. I'm doing the other thing.”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish

“I look into his gray-blue dying eyes. We’re staring at each other, showing each other our last looks, the faces we’ll take with us into eternity, and I’m thinking how I wish I knew him better, how I wish we’d had a life together, wishing my father wasn’t such a complete and utter goddamn mystery to me...”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish

“All of a sudden my arms were full of the most fantastic life, frenetic, impossible to hold on to even if I’d wanted to, and I wanted to. But then all I was holding was the blanket, because my father had jumped into the river. And that’s when I discovered my father hadn’t been dying after all. He was changing, transforming himself into something new and different to carry his life forward.”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish

“Being alone was lonely, but there was an even greater loneliness sometimes when he was surrounded by a lot of other people who were constantly making demands of him. He needed a break. C”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish

“So in a way it was true: as I grew, he shrank. And by this logic one day I would become a giant, and Edward would become nothing, invisible in the world. B”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish

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Popular quotes

“He reaches over, takes my face in his hands and pulls me to him. In my idle moments, imagining such a scene, I have always assumed that it would be the other way round, that I would reach for him and he would pull away, denouncing me as a degenerate and a false friend. But now I am neither shocked nor surprised by his initiative, nor do I feel any of the great urgency that I thought I would, should this moment ever come to pass. Instead, it feels perfectly natural, everything he does to me, everything that he allows to happen between us. And for the first time since that dreadful afternoon when my father beat me to within an inch of my life, I feel that I have come home.”
― John Boyne, quote from The Absolutist

“The fight isn't over until you win it...That's all you have to remember. No matter what the other man thinks.”
― Robin Hobb, quote from The Farseer Trilogy

“And now, thanks to Cooper, I didn't even know what world I belong in.”
― Claudia Lefeve, quote from Parallel

“it was like this. the brain could no longer bear the worries and pains that were imposed on it. it said: "i'm giving up; but if there is anyone else here who is interested in preserving the whole, let him assume part of my burden and it will be alright for a bit.”
― Franz Kafka, quote from Letters to Milena: Expanded and Revised in a New Translation

“There was an army of hundreds of thousands of spirits fighting alongside the blacks, and that was why finally the whites were defeated. Everyone is in agreement about that, even the French soldiers, who felt the spirits’ fury. Maître Valmorain, who did not believe in anything he did not understand, and as he understood very little believed in nothing, was also convinced that the dead aided the rebels.”
― Isabel Allende, quote from Island Beneath the Sea

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