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21 " 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 , Wolf in White Van
22 " People trying to help you when you’re past help are raw and helpless. Nobody wins: you get nothing; they feel worse. "
23 " but people underestimate just how starved everybody is for some magic pathway back into childhood. "
24 " There is something fierce and starved about first ideas. "
25 " 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. "
26 " 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. "
27 " 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. "
28 " You should avoid seeing too much of yourself anywhere: in the outside world, in others, in the imagined worlds that give you shelter. "
29 " 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. "
30 " 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. "
31 " 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. "
32 " 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. "
33 " 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. "
34 " Some lessons you learn gradually and some you learn in a sudden moment, like a flash going off in a dark room. "
35 " 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. "
36 " And then I played some music, old music, and it sounded awful, and I loved it, I loved it so much. "
37 " 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. "
38 " Who doesn’t want to rise above the obstacles in his pathway? Who wouldn’t want to go down in flames? "
39 " Everything became infused with purpose. It’s hard to overstate how deep the need can get for things to make sense. "
40 " Forever is a question you start asking when you look at the ceiling. "