“This is why people cry at the movies: because everybody’s doomed. No one in a movie can help themselves in any way. Their fate has already staked its claim on them from the moment they appear onscreen.”
― John Darnielle, quote from Wolf in White Van
“There are only two stories: either you go forward or you die.”
― John Darnielle, quote from Wolf in White Van
“I didn’t feel like I’d really won anything, but I had come through the day no worse off than I’d come into it, which, as I have been telling myself for many years now, is a victory whether it feels like one or not.”
― John Darnielle, quote from Wolf in White Van
“but people underestimate just how starved everybody is for some magic pathway back into childhood.”
― John Darnielle, quote from Wolf in White Van
“In video games you sometimes run into what they call a side quest, and if you don't manage to figure it out you can usually just go back into the normal world of the game and continue on toward your objective. I felt like I couldn't find my way back to the world now: like I was somebody locked in a meaningless side quest, in a stuck screen.”
― John Darnielle, quote from Wolf in White Van
“There is something fierce and starved about first ideas.”
― John Darnielle, quote from Wolf in White Van
“People trying to help you when you’re past help are raw and helpless. Nobody wins: you get nothing; they feel worse.”
― John Darnielle, quote from Wolf in White Van
“Some things are hard to explain to your parents. Some things are hard to explain, period, but your parents especially are never going to understand them.”
― John Darnielle, quote from Wolf in White Van
“For reasons that seem obvious to me, I don’t believe in happy endings or even in endings at all, but I am as susceptible to moments of indulgent fantasy as anybody else.”
― John Darnielle, quote from Wolf in White Van
“It isn’t really much of a mystery, this occasional need I have to comfort my father. I did something terrible to his son once.”
― John Darnielle, quote from Wolf in White Van
“And I started to say “fine,” and I meant to say “fine,” but I ended up saying that I felt my life was filled like a big jug to the brim with almost indescribable joy, so much that I hardly knew how to handle it.”
― John Darnielle, quote from Wolf in White Van
“I am heavy in his arms, and I feel safe there, but I am lost, and I need constantly to be shoring up the wall that holds my emotions at bay, or I will feel something too great to contain.”
― John Darnielle, quote from Wolf in White Van
“You should avoid seeing too much of yourself anywhere: in the outside world, in others, in the imagined worlds that give you shelter.”
― John Darnielle, quote from Wolf in White Van
“Forever is a question you start asking when you look at the ceiling. It becomes a word you hear in the same way that people who associate sound with color might hear a flat sky-blue. The open sky through which forgotten satellites travel. Forever.”
― John Darnielle, quote from Wolf in White Van
“My parents’ room is an uncataloged planet, a night sky presence unknown to scientists but feared by the secret faithful who trade rumors of its mystery.”
― John Darnielle, quote from Wolf in White Van
“Normal adult shopping is something I will never actually do, because it’s no more possible for me to go shopping like normal adults do than it is for a man with no legs to wake up one day and walk. I can’t miss shopping like you’d miss things you once had. I miss it in a different way. I miss it like you would miss a train.”
― John Darnielle, quote from Wolf in White Van
“People were always saying how ugly Southern California was, especially when they came back from their summer vacations. They said it looked plastic or fake or whatever, and talked about all the cool things they saw in Ohio, where their grandparents lived. Or in Pennsylvania. The wall behind the arcade was made of giant sparkling white bricks, just like all the other buildings connected to it. There was graffiti on it, indecipherable gang writing. It was dark now and getting a little cold and then the super-bright lights they have behind stores to keep bums from sleeping by the dumpsters came on, and I thought, people who don’t think Southern California is the most beautiful place in the world are idiots and I hope they choke on their tongues.”
― John Darnielle, quote from Wolf in White Van
“When anger rears up in me I have a trick I do where I picture it as a freshly uncoiled snake dropping down from the jungle canopy and heading for my neck. If I look at it directly it’ll disappear, but I have to do it while the snake’s still dropping or it will strike. This sounds like something they’d teach you in therapy at the hospital or something, but it’s not. It’s just a trick I found somewhere by myself. Once you’ve looked at a deadly thing and seen it disappear, what more is there to do? Walk on through the empty jungle toward the city past the clearing.”
― John Darnielle, quote from Wolf in White Van
“Some lessons you learn gradually and some you learn in a sudden moment, like a flash going off in a dark room.”
― John Darnielle, quote from Wolf in White Van
“Who doesn’t want to rise above the obstacles in his pathway? Who wouldn’t want to go down in flames?”
― John Darnielle, quote from Wolf in White Van
“And then I played some music, old music, and it sounded awful, and I loved it, I loved it so much.”
― John Darnielle, quote from Wolf in White Van
“Some lessons you learn gradually and some you learn in a sudden moment, like a flash going off in a dark room. I sift and rake and dig around in my vivid recollections of young Sean on the floor in summer, and I try to see what makes him tick, but I know a secret about young Sean, I guess, that he kind of ends up telling the world: nothing makes him tick. It just happens all by itself, tick tick tick tick tick, without any proximal cause, with nothing underneath it. He is like a jellyfish adrift in the sea, throbbing quietly in the warm waves of the surf just off the highway where the dusty white vans with smoked windows and indistinct decals near their wheel hubs roll innocently past.”
― John Darnielle, quote from Wolf in White Van
“Forever is a question you start asking when you look at the ceiling.”
― John Darnielle, quote from Wolf in White Van
“I was happy to know her in my small, formal, dependent way. And I felt a ravenous grief for nice boys who are too stupid to take care of themselves, and too dumb to remember to check the surrounding brush for snakes before settling down to sleep for the night.”
― John Darnielle, quote from Wolf in White Van
“Trying to explain the feeling I had is like trying to describe what you see when your eyes are bandaged: it’s not impossible, but it’s different from describing something you can actually look at, something you might see in the course of a normal day. It is trying to describe something at which you are unable to look directly.”
― John Darnielle, quote from Wolf in White Van
“either inventing internal worlds or having no world at all to inhabit,”
― John Darnielle, quote from Wolf in White Van
“I was little the first time I heard the term “ghost town”; I fell immediately in love.”
― John Darnielle, quote from Wolf in White Van
“You could hear, in the questions they asked and how they asked them, that there were right answers, things they wanted to hear.”
― John Darnielle, quote from Wolf in White Van
“Everything became infused with purpose. It’s hard to overstate how deep the need can get for things to make sense.”
― John Darnielle, quote from Wolf in White Van
“No way of counting my blessings. No way for anyone to count that high.”
― John Darnielle, quote from Wolf in White Van
John Darnielle
Born place: in Bloomington, Indiana, The United States
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“You have the power to tear me to pieces, to wound me so deep and true that I‘ll never recover.”
― Nalini Singh, quote from Kiss of Snow
“Approaching the forest from the west was no army, but a delegation of Grailsundanian master surgeons on their way to an appendix conference . . . But that isn't the craziest part of the story - oh, no, my boy, for approaching from the east was a party of itinerant watchmakers bound for the pocket-watch fair at Wimbleton . . . But not even that is the craziest part of the story! For apporaching from the south were over a hundred armourers and locksmiths on their way to Florinth, where some power-hungry prince had commissioned them to build a monstrous war machine . . . Well, that would be enough crazy coincedences for an averagely crazy story but the battle of Nurn Forest involved the most improbable coincedences in the history of Zamonia. For entering the forest, this time from the north came a delegation of alchemists.”
― Walter Moers, quote from Rumo & His Miraculous Adventures
“In Phnom Penh, it seems that the more money you have, the more stairs you have to climb to your home. Ma”
― Loung Ung, quote from First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers
“Mrs. Earwig (pronounced Ar-wige, at least by Mrs. Earwig) believed in shiny wands, and magical amulets and mystic runes and the power of the stars, while Granny Weatherwax in cups of tea, dry biscuits, washing every morning in cold water and, well...mostly she believed in Granny Weatherwax.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Wintersmith
“But how can I begin writing when I do not know whether I shall have time enough, and the torture comes when you say to yourself, ‘Yesterday there would have been enough time’—and again you think, ‘If only I had begun yesterday …’ And instead of the clear and precise work that is needed, instead of a gradual preparation of the soul for that morning when it will have to get up, when—when you, soul, will be offered the executioner’s pail to wash in—Instead, you involuntarily indulge in banal senseless dreams of escape—alas, of escape …”
― Vladimir Nabokov, quote from Invitation to a Beheading
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Still Life with Brea...BookQuoters 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.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
