48
" Nurses and doctors come and go, and family. It's like they're visiting a person at his lonely outpost on the space station, miles above the earth. How do they get there - just coming in through the door like that? In the brief moment between infinite communion with the ceiling and the beginning of whatever conversation they've come to strike up, it seems like the deepest mystery in the world. And then they break the spell, and the world contracts, palpably shifts from one reality into a new and much more unpleasant one, in which there is pain, and suffering, and people who when they are hurt stay hurt for a long time or sometimes forever, if there is such a thing as forever. 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 shy through which forgotten satellites travel. Forever. "
― John Darnielle , Wolf in White Van
54
" A player’s first move isn’t necessarily the truest or clearest view of that person I’ll get, but it’s often the most naked, because it takes a while to situate yourself within an imaginary landscape. When you respond to the initial subscriber packet with your opening move—when you come to the bridge—you haven’t had a chance to get much sense of the game’s rhythms, so you’re awkward, halting, more likely to overplay your hand. The open path at the overpass gives way to grand schemes, huge, multipart responses, whole narratives from within the canvas newly forming inside the player’s imagination. I keep myself out of it; I interpret and react, like a flowchart responding flatly to a person who’s asking it how to live. "
― John Darnielle , Wolf in White Van