Quotes by John Darnielle

When you punish a person for dreaming his dreamDont expect him to thank or forgive you.

And when the clouds do clear awayGet a momentary chance to seeThe thing Ive been trying to beat to deathThe soft creature that I used to beThe better animal I used to be

Its in the nature of the landscape to change, and its in the nature of people to help the process along...

The wind comes across the plains not howling but singing. Its the difference between this wind and its big-city cousins: the full-throated wind of the plains has leeway to seek out the hidden registers of its voice. Where immigrant farmers planted windbreaks a hundred and fifty years ago. it keens in protest; where the young corn shoots up, it whispers as it passes, crossing field after field in its own time, following eastward trends but in no hurry to find open water. You cant usually see it in paintings, but its an important part of the scenery.

It’s hard to describe, this feeling of seeing your kids spending time together like adults, meeting up again after being out there in the world like free agents. There’s something giddy and unreal about it. I knew that boy when he was afraid of strangers. I knew them both before they knew how to talk.

If you work with or around children, you often hear a lot about how resilient they are. Its true; Ive met children whove been through things that would drive most adults to the brink. They look and act, most of the time, like any other children. In this sense – that they dont succumb to despair, that they dont demand a space for their pain – its very true that children are resilient. But resiliency only means that a thing retains its shape. That it doesnt break, or lose its ability to function. It doesnt mean a child forgets the time she shared in the backyard with her mother gardening, or the fun they had together watching Bedknobs and Broomsticks at the Astro. It just means she learns to bear it. The mechanism that allowed Lisa Sample to keep her head above water in the wak of her mothers departure has not been described or cataloged by scientists. Its efficient, and flexible, and probably transferable from one person to another should they catch the scent on each other. But the rest of the details about it arent observable from the outside. You have to be closer than you really want to get to see how it works.

Cool parents, I thought, are the ones who know nothing. It made me feel a little sad for mine, but I didnt say any of this.

Their boots were black and shiny and your treasures gleamed like stars,Bones from deep down in the fertile crescent.

My grief sought out all parts of my body it hadnt yet inhabited, and I felt like I might collapse in on myself right there, at last, spectacularly

Dark, primitive magic. Swords Against Death.

To the left, just past the painting, on the other side of the hall, is the bathroom, the sort of open door that if cameras found it as they passed through the house in a horror movie would trigger a blast of synthesizers.

There are so many different kinds of ghosts.

And then I went back into my room, locked into a sequence as perfect as a pattern, and I sat down on my great rock throne, invisible to the outside world but palpable beneath me, and from how my face felt I thought maybe I was crying, either because I didn’t want to do this or because I did, it was hard to tell and anyway I never would, who would believe me in either case and who would be there to believe me in all cases, it was a puzzle, I had yet to learn the way of the jigsaw, and so I positioned the rifle beneath my chin, it feels cold, like an actual thing in the actual present physical world, OK, there it is, I am here now, and then I lay down on my belly and listened to the rising squall beyond the door.

I thought about the guy in the truck, the focus in his expression, and I felt like I already knew enough of the story to tell it to somebody else maybe better than either of its major players could.

But resiliency only means that a thing retains its shape. That it doesn’t break, or lose its ability to function. It doesn’t mean a child forgets the time she shared in the backyard with her mother gardening, or the fun they had together watching Bedknobs and Broomsticks at the Astro. It just means she learns to bear it. The mechanism that allowed Lisa Sample to keep her head above water in the wake of her mother’s departure has not been described or cataloged by scientists. It’s efficient, and flexible, and probably transferable from one person to another should they catch the scent on each other. But the rest of the details about it aren’t observable from the outside. You have to be closer than you really want to get to see how it works.

Who knows the secrets of anybody’s heart.

The inside of the Trace Italian, of course, does not exist. A player can get close enough to see it: it shines in the new deserts of Kansas, gleaming in the sun or starkly rising from the winter cold. The rock walls that protect it meet in points around it, one giving way to another, for days on end. But the dungeons into which youll fall as you work through the pathways to its gates number in the low hundreds, and if you actually get into the entry hall, there are a few hundred more sub-dungeons before youll actually reach somewhere thats truly safe. Technically, its possible to get to the last room in the final chamber of the Trace Italian, but no one will ever do it. No one will ever live that long.

I wish theyd conduct a national poll to find out who feels out of place and who doesnt. Just to get the numbers, you know? To get a feel for how many of us there are. Sometimes at work I get the feeling that its got to be right up against 100%. I’ll head out to the register to help out during the lunch rush and the new cashier will look so confused and lost, and then I’ll look at the customers she’s supposed to be helping, and they’ll look lost, too, and then when I sneak a glance toward the tables there’ll be all these people staring at their food or at each other with blank looks in their eyes. And I’ll think: Is this just me? Is everybody else actually fine, and I’m just trying to imagine that they’re like me? But I don’t think so. I’ve thought about this a lot, and I’m pretty sure that some ridiculous percentage of the population is walking around feeling like aliens. I think teenagers feel that all the time...

Good things never last, bad things never die.

Metal has its own code of cool, but its not really trying to be cool. And that was very refreshing to me, that metal is very much about expressing something that seems awesome to you even if, at the time, much of the world was going to mock and reject it.