“Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour. You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep. And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body. The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and the loss is too empty to share.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, quote from House of Leaves
“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, quote from House of Leaves
“This much I'm certain of: it doesn't happen immediately. You'll finish [the book] and that will be that, until a moment will come, maybe in a month, maybe a year, maybe even several years. You'll be sick or feeling troubled or deeply in love or quietly uncertain or even content for the first time in your life. It won't matter. Out of the blue, beyond any cause you can trace, you'll suddenly realize things are not how you perceived them to be at all. 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. You'll have forgotten what granted you this awareness in the first place
...
You might try then, as I did, to find a sky so full of stars it will blind you again. Only no sky can blind you now. Even with all that iridescent magic up there, 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. It will get so bad you'll be afraid to look away, you'll be afraid to sleep.
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 of your carefully conceived denials, whether deliberate or unconscious. And then 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, quote from House of Leaves
“Maturity, one discovers, has everything to do with the acceptance of ‘not knowing.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, quote from House of Leaves
“It may be the wrong decision, but fuck it, it's mine.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, quote from House of Leaves
“Little solace comes
to those who grieve
when thoughts keep drifting
as walls keep shifting
and this great blue world of ours
seems a house of leaves
moments before the wind.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, quote from House of Leaves
“We all create stories to protect ourselves.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, quote from House of Leaves
“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.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, quote from House of Leaves
“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, quote from House of Leaves
“Scars are the paler pain of survival received unwillingly and displayed in the language of injury.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, quote from House of Leaves
“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.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, quote from House of Leaves
“Sublime is something you choke on after a shot of tequila.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, quote from House of Leaves
“Losing the possibility of something is the exact same thing as losing hope and without hope nothing can survive.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, quote from House of Leaves
“I am not a fool. I am wise. I will run from my fear, I will outdistance my fear, then I will hide from my fear, I will wait for my fear, I will let my fear run past me, then I will follow my fear, I will track my fear until I can approach my fear in complete silence, then I will strike at my fear, I will charge my fear, I will grab hold of my fear, I will sink my fingers into my fear, then I will bite my fear, I will tear the throat of my fear, I will break the neck of my fear, I will drink the blood of my fear, I will gulp the flesh of my fear, I will crush the bones of my fear, and I will savor my fear, I will swallow my fear, all of it, and then I will digest my fear until I can do nothing else but shit out my fear. In this way I will be made stronger”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, quote from House of Leaves
“Why did god create a dual universe?
So he might say
‘Be not like me. I am alone.'
And it might be heard.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, quote from House of Leaves
“I took my morning walk, I took my evening walk, I ate something, I thought about something, I wrote, I napped and dreamt something too, and with all that something, I still have nothing because so much of sum’thing has always been and always will be you.
I miss you.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, quote from House of Leaves
“Prometheus, thief of light, giver of light, bound by the gods, must have been a book.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, quote from House of Leaves
“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.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, quote from House of Leaves
“Love of love written by the broken hearted, love of life written by the dead.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, quote from House of Leaves
“Some people reflect light, some deflect it, you by some miracle, seem to collect it.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, quote from House of Leaves
“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, quote from House of Leaves
“What can I say, I'm a sucker for abandoned stuff, misplaced stuff, forgotten stuff, any old stuff which despite the light of progress and all that, still vanishes every day like shadows at noon, goings unheralded, passings unmourned, well, you get the drift.
As a counselor once told me -a counselor for Disaffected Yought, I might add: "You like that crap because it reminds you of you." Couldn't of said it better or put it more bluntly. Don't even disagree with it either.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, quote from House of Leaves
“And where there is no Echo there is no description of space or love. There is only silence.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, quote from House of Leaves
“No one ever really gets used to nightmares.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, quote from House of Leaves
“The ruminations are mine,
let
the world
be yours.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, quote from House of Leaves
“You'll be sick or feeling troubled or deeply in love or quietly uncertain or even content for the first time in your life. It won't matter. Out of the blue, beyond any cause you can trace, you'll suddenly realize things are not how you perceived them to be at all. 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.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, quote from House of Leaves
“The greatest of love letters are always coded for the one and not the many.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, quote from House of Leaves
“By now you've probably noticed that except when safely contained by quotes, Zampanò always steers clear of such questionable four-letter language. This instance in particular proves that beneath all that cool psuedo-academic hogwash lurked a very passionate man who knew how important it was to say "fuck" now and then, and say it loud too, relish its syllabic sweetness, its immigrant pride, a great American epic word really, starting at the lower lip, often the very front of the lower lip, before racing all the way to the back of the throat, where it finishes with a great blast, the concussive force of the K catching up then with the hush of the F already on its way, thus loading it with plenty of offense and edge and certainly ambiguity. FUCK. A great by-the-bootstrap prayer or curse if 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, immersed in all that word-heat.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, quote from House of Leaves
Mark Z. Danielewski
Born place: in New York, The United States
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“...for those who value stability, who fear transience, uncertainty, change, have erected a powerful system of stigmas and taboos against rootlessness, that disruptive, anti-social force, so that we mostly conform, we pretend to be motivated by loyalties and solidarities we do not really feel, we hide our secret identities beneath the false skins of those identities which bear the belongers' seal of approval. But the truth leaks out in our dreams; alone in our beds (because we are all alone at night, even if we do not sleep by ourselves), we soar, we fly, we flee. And in the waking dreams our societies permit, in our myths, our arts, our songs, we celbrate the non-belongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks. What we forbid ourselves we pay good money to watch, in a playhouse or movie theatre, or to read about between the secret covers of a book. Our libraries, our palaces of entertainment tell the truth. The tramp, the assassin, the rebel, the thief, the mutant, the outcast, the delinquent, the devil, the sinner, the traveller, the gangster, the runner, the mask: if we did not recognize in them our least-fulfilled needs, we would not invent them over and over again, in every place, in every language, in every time.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Ground Beneath Her Feet
“Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.”
― Marcel Proust, quote from Time Regained
“Outside, daylight was bleeding slowly toward dusk.”
― Richard Bachman, quote from The Running Man
“Preparing the communal evening meal sometimes caused arguments. Every village in Sicily had a different recipe for squid and eels, disagreed on what herbs should be disbarred from the tomato sauce. And whether sausages should ever be baked.”
― Mario Puzo, quote from The Sicilian
“You’ve kidnapped my friend. Sucked her brain out! Not that she had much to begin with, but—”
“Bite me.” The laughter didn’t hurt, now. I didn’t even feel weird saying it. Bite me.
Pretty funny, for a part-vampire.
“Ha. You wish. Lesbo vamp girl.”
“Lesbo?”
“You love me.”
“We’d never work, Nat. You’re too high maintenance.”
We both cracked up, and right then, the darkness was kind.”
― Lili St. Crow, quote from Reckoning
The Demon's Lexicon
Makers
Sanctuary
Dearly Devoted Dexte...
Lud-in-the-MistBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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