Top 160 John Darnielle Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Do every stupid thing that makes you feel alive.”

— John Darnielle

2. “Good things never last, bad things never die.”

— John Darnielle

3. “May we all emerge from winter with our strength renewed and any unwanted pieces left under the ice.”

— John Darnielle

Featured in: Winter Quotes

4. “It’s hard to stay positive when there’s a lot of evil in the world.”

— John Darnielle

5. “There are only two stories: either you go forward or you die.”

— John Darnielle

6. “Human beings are selfish by nature. Everything that happens to a child, you immediately grab your own child and say, “I will never let that happen to you.””

— John Darnielle

7. “People say friends don’t destroy one another – what do they know about friends?”

— John Darnielle

8. “When you punish a person for dreaming his dream, don’t expect him to thank or forgive you.”

— John Darnielle

9. “Kayfabe is kind of a code. To break kayfabe is to let people know that the punch was not real and that the match was scripted.”

— John Darnielle

10. “You can get really good reads on your dreams if you think of every character in them as actually being you.”

— John Darnielle

11. “Every place on earth has a frequency. It’s not good or bad, it’s just the way it is, and if you can attune yourself to that frequency, then you can find comfort in that.”

— John Darnielle

12. “God is present in the sweeping gesture, but the devil is in the details.”

— John Darnielle

13. “I really love Durham more than any place I’ve ever been; some small towns can be really provincial and strangling, but Durham is the best city in the world.”

— John Darnielle

14. “It’s impossible to be content all the time – you have to learn to be content in places where you’re unhappy and owning your emotions, whatever they are.”

— John Darnielle

15. “It’s not that nobody ever gets away: that’s not true. It’s that you carry it with you. It doesn’t matter that the days roll on like hills too low to give names to; they might be of use later, so you keep them. You replay them to keep their memory alive. It feels worthwhile because it is.”

— John Darnielle

16. “Anger is preverbal, so, by the time you’re using words to express an angry feeling, you’re already imposing loads of structure on that primal experience.”

— John Darnielle

17. “At 23, you can completely, literally reinvent yourself if you want to.”

— John Darnielle

18. “I just started writing stuff to kill time on summer evenings. This is why I’m always telling people who ask me what they need to do to succeed to give up, do something else.”

— John Darnielle

19. “The more I learn about stuff the more conscious I become of grave gaps in my knowledge.”

— John Darnielle

20. “People talk about songwriting or comedy as creative expression, but life is creative expression. Table-making, even nursing, is extraordinarily creative.”

— John Darnielle

21. “I didn’t feel like I’d really won anything, but I had come through the day no worse off than I’d come into it, which, as I have been telling myself for many years now, is a victory whether it feels like one or not.”

— John Darnielle

22. “I don’t celebrate milestones and I don’t do anniversary editions. It’s not my style to reflect on accomplishments.”

— John Darnielle

23. “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.”

— John Darnielle

24. “There are so many ways to respond to music besides feeling like someone’s communicating with you. It gives me a charge.”

— John Darnielle

25. “Some lessons you learn gradually and some you learn in a sudden moment, like a flash going off in a dark room.”

— John Darnielle

26. “Anything that is within you is a gift. To be able to take possession of that and say, “Whatever it is, I am bigger than it,” is to learn to cherish even the hard and painful things.”

— John Darnielle

27. “You learn to present dark things without including their ability to harm, treasuring them for what they are.”

— John Darnielle

28. “I am a person of high energy. That, and I sit down and I write when I get an idea – I put other things aside.”

— John Darnielle

29. “I always want to try and see what the appeal is in anything. It’s the healthiest and most honest approach.”

— John Darnielle

30. “There’s this idea that there was a point in our childhood when we were in some way better than we are now and we should try to hang on to that.”

— John Darnielle

31. “In video games you sometimes run into what they call a side quest, and if you don’t manage to figure it out you can usually just go back into the normal world of the game and continue on toward your objective. I felt like I couldn’t find my way back to the world now: like I was somebody locked in a meaningless side quest, in a stuck screen.”

— John Darnielle

32. “Life is hard, you’re tired, and there’s disease. The strategy that works for children is to be delighted by the things that delight you.”

— John Darnielle

33. “I’m sort of a cavedweller: I miss my house, my yard, my kitchen, my wife. The trees. When I get home, I like to get down into my office neighborhood as soon as I can.”

— John Darnielle

34. “This is why people cry at the movies: because everybody’s doomed. No one in a movie can help themselves in any way. Their fate has already staked its claim on them from the moment they appear onscreen.”

— John Darnielle

35. “You always feel like your 18-year-old self in some sense. And that’s what walking through New York on a June evening feels like – you feel like it’s Friday and you’re 17 years old.”

— John Darnielle

36. “No way of counting my blessings. No way for anyone to count that high.”

— John Darnielle

37. “Gender relations are a sad story of men talking trash about women all over the world.”

— John Darnielle

38. “You should avoid seeing too much of yourself anywhere: in the outside world, in others, in the imagined worlds that give you shelter.”

— John Darnielle

39. “I am at a place in my life where the more like a cave I can make my surroundings, the happier I am.”

— John Darnielle

40. “People involved in my personal life make fun of me a lot for not being jaded.”

— John Darnielle

41. “I get nostalgic about having lived in Ames, Iowa, even though being a vegetarian in Iowa is not fun.”

— John Darnielle

42. “Trying to explain the feeling I had is like trying to describe what you see when your eyes are bandaged: it’s not impossible, but it’s different from describing something you can actually look at, something you might see in the course of a normal day. It is trying to describe something at which you are unable to look directly.”

— John Darnielle

43. “Not everybody relates to pain, but if you can watch other people playacting it, you can absorb some of that vibe. It’s like watching horror movies – you want to have the experience, but in a safe environment.”

— John Darnielle

44. “It makes me envious of anybody who can say truly that they don’t care what anybody thinks of what they do, because I care a lot about the people who like my stuff.”

— John Darnielle

45. “One way you can get really close to God is to sin as hard as you can.”

— John Darnielle

46. “I seem to get the best work when I’m angry and depressed and alienated.”

— John Darnielle

47. “People trying to help you when you’re past help are raw and helpless. Nobody wins: you get nothing; they feel worse.”

— John Darnielle

48. “When I was kid, they always used to tell me to keep notebooks. I look at my shelves now and it’s just nothing but notebooks. And if I haven’t gotten an idea but I have time to work, I’ll pull one out and I bet there will be five or six sentences that will kick me off.”

— John Darnielle

49. “I crave music that’ll sort of hurtle me into space and release me up there.”

— John Darnielle

50. “If you’re standing in the middle of a ring and you’re playing the villain, and everyone is booing and throwing things at you, that’s real.”

— John Darnielle