Quotes by David Vann

Even now, I still believe metamorphosis is the greatest beauty.

History...to stand in a place and know that this where you come from for a dozen generations or maybe a hundred generations or maybe more. To know there was a great city two thousand years ago in this place, and that your ancestors helped build it and lived there and worked there. When you walk down a small road, all the others who are walking there with you from before.

As if each of us might somehow have a blueprint. As if somewhere theres the shape of my life, and I had the chance to choose a few variations, but not far from the pattern.

What would the world be like if men never ruled again?

A change in those moments, some switch turned off forever, the end of trust or safety or love, and how do we ever find the switch again?

Maybe this is as near as we can come to forgiveness. Not the past wiped away, nothing undone, but some willingness in the present, some recognition and embrace and slowing down.

Ive thought of it ever since, the idea that we dont stray far, that what feels like discovery is only the revealing of what was hidden but there, waiting. I remember because I think this might be a path to forgiveness, to realize that no matter how violent, how frightening my mother was, it was not random but at least partly inescapable, that who she was had been set in motion long before and she had to suffer that person as much as I did.

There are no gods, only men.

And only men could have invented the idea of a king.

There can be no god without desire.

If enough people repeat the stories for long enough, Jason will become something that cannot die, but he also will have been erased, because the actions are too large and impersonal. The stories will reveal nothing about the real man who lived.

Each one a little bit different but following some blueprint somewhere. As if each of us might have a blueprint. As if somewhere theres the shape of my life, and I had the chance to choose a few variations, but not far from the pattern.

What myth can hold when you kneel in your brother’s remains? When you slit his throat yourself? What story can guide us if we can betray all?

The worst part of childhood is not knowing that bad things pass, that time passes. A terrible moment in childhood hovers with s kind of eternity, unbearable.

We live through evolution ourselves, each of us, progressing through different apprehensions of the world, at each age forgetting the last age, every previous mind erased. We no longer see the same world at all.

This is what I’ve always loved about a city, all the worlds hidden away inside, largest of aquariums.