01UndatedWhen you punish a person for dreaming his dreamDon't expect him to thank or forgive you.John Darnielle / quote ↗
02UndatedAnd when the clouds do clear awayGet a momentary chance to seeThe thing I've been trying to beat to deathThe soft creature that I used to beThe better animal I used to beJohn Darnielle / quote ↗
03UndatedIt's in the nature of the landscape to change, and it's in the nature of people to help the process along...John Darnielle / quote ↗
04UndatedThe wind comes across the plains not howling but singing. It's 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 can't usually see it in paintings, but it's an important part of the scenery.John Darnielle / quote ↗
05UndatedIt’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.John Darnielle / quote ↗
06UndatedIf you work with or around children, you often hear a lot about how resilient they are. It's true; I've met children who've 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 don't succumb to despair, that they don't demand a space for their pain – it's very true that children are resilient. 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 wak 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.John Darnielle / quote ↗
07UndatedCool parents, I thought, are the ones who know nothing. It made me feel a little sad for mine, but I didn't say any of this.John Darnielle / quote ↗
08UndatedTheir boots were black and shiny and your treasures gleamed like stars,Bones from deep down in the fertile crescent.John Darnielle / quote ↗
09UndatedMy grief sought out all parts of my body it hadn't yet inhabited, and I felt like I might collapse in on myself right there, at last, spectacularlyJohn Darnielle / quote ↗
11UndatedTo 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.John Darnielle / quote ↗
13UndatedAnd 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.John Darnielle / quote ↗
14UndatedI 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.John Darnielle / quote ↗
15UndatedBut 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.John Darnielle / quote ↗
17UndatedThe 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 you'll 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 you'll actually reach somewhere that's truly safe. Technically, it's 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.John Darnielle / quote ↗
18UndatedI wish they'd conduct a national poll to find out who feels out of place and who doesn't. 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 it's 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...John Darnielle / quote ↗
20UndatedMetal has its own code of cool, but it's 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.John Darnielle / quote ↗
21UndatedYou get this really cool groove when you're playing just piano, bass, and drums where everyone's sort of feeling each other's space, which is the only way to put it, but it really is true, and everyone's sort of sitting in their own pocket. It's kind of jazz-like.John Darnielle / quote ↗
23UndatedPeople like to say how much they like stuff, but with 'The Sunset Tree,' people shared stories about what it meant for them. And that stuff's so humbling and amazing.John Darnielle / quote ↗
24UndatedMy feminism is what came squarely up against my faith. There's a lot of ecstatic post-patriarchal Christians who have stuff they do with that. But at that point, you're doing Christianity with a double-superscript. The Bible, and especially the book of Genesis, is pretty unapologetically patriarchal.John Darnielle / quote ↗
