Welcome to Night Vale

Fear is a reasonable response to life.

She understood the world and her place in it. She understood nothing. The world and her place in it were nothing and she understood that.

Remember that misuse of language can lead to miscommunication, and that miscommunication leads to everything that has ever happened in the whole of the world.

Comfort was the answer to all life's problems. It didn't solve them, but it made them more distant for a bit as they quietly worsened.

The search for truth takes us to dangerous places,” said Old Woman Josie. “Often it takes us to that most dangerous place: the library. You know who said that? No? George Washington did. Minutes before librarians ate him.

People are beautiful when they do beautiful things.

It was a fair question, although the problem with fair questions is that they are asked about an unfair world.

She left the shower as most people leave showers, clean and a little lonely.

She was angry, which is the more productive cousin of fear.

Librarians are hideous creatures of unimaginable power. And even if you could imagine their power, it would be illegal. It is absolutely illegal to even try to picture what such a being would be like.

People who grow older think they are so wise, she thought. Like time means anything at all.

In terms of tacos, she was doing fine.

There is nothing more lonely than an action taken quietly on your own, and nothing more comforting than doing that same quiet action in parallel with fellow humans doing the same action, everyone alone next to each other.

In other news, a recent report suggests that things may not be as they seem.

Sleep is confusing. Dreams are baffling. The concept of transitioning from one perceived reality to another is a tolerated madness.

She was not shy, but maybe lazy socially. Not willing to seek out situations and connections that were not already part of her routine.

Almost always we are all experiencing the same problems as everyone else,” said Josie, “and pretending we don’t so that every one of us thinks we are alone.

Sometimes it is easy to forget which things in the world can feel pain and which cannot.

there’s no sense in going through life presuming awful things about people you do not know.

To be remembered is, I think, a basic human right. Not one that occurs to a person when it is there, but like a parched throat in a desert when it is gone.

But babies become children, and they go to elementary schools that indoctrinate them on how to overthrow governments, and they get interested in boys and girls, or they don't, and anyway they change.

She didn’t have a good reason for most of what she did. Mostly, she went by what seemed right in the moment, and justified it to herself later, and in this way she was no different than anyone else she knew.

It's not other people that hurt us, but what we feel about them

We are skipping Friday this week, but we’ll make up for it by having Double Friday next week. Mark your schedules.

Her body no longer felt young. All of her energy had been robbed from her. She felt old, looked young, was neither.

Clocks and calendars don’t work in Night Vale. Time itself doesn’t work.

The Night Vale PTA released a statement today saying that if the School Board could not promise to prevent children from learning about dangerous activities like drug use and library science during recess periods, they would be blocking all school entrances with their bodies. They pulled hundreds of bodies out from trucks, saying, “We own all of these bodies and we will not hesitate to use them to create great flesh barricades if that is what it takes to prevent our children from learning.

It would be safe to assume that the house is an enclosed structure owned and built by people. It would be weird to assume that the house has a personality, a soul. Why would anyone assume that? It is true. It does. But that was weird to assume that. Never assume that kind of thing.

We live in a pattern that we'll never detect, and that will shuffle us through invisible hierarchies to the actual death of us.

Desperation does not breed empathy or clear thinking.