Top 160 John Darnielle Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 4

51. “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

52. “There is no identifiable accent here unless you’ve cultivated a very careful ear. This is an easy place to live, milder in feel than Nebraska to the west, negligibly warmer in the winter than Minnesota to the north, of less imagined consequence to the world than Illinois to the east or Missouri to the south.”

— John Darnielle

53. “Back in the 90s, if you did mail order in music, you could make a good living doing it if you could hustle.”

— John Darnielle

54. “Not everybody wants to get out and see the world. Nothing wrong with that. Sometimes you just want to figure out how to fit yourself into the world you already know.”

— John Darnielle

55. “I’m so disconnected from an indie-rock community that I am the hermit people used to guess I was.”

— John Darnielle

56. “I usually kind of can’t wait until my records leak. Back in the day, you could give people tapes, but you can’t do that anymore, because it would be available to everyone on the planet within an hour.”

— John Darnielle

57. “The studio’s a collaborative environment. I just try to let people bring their own ideas to the songs and see what happens.”

— John Darnielle

58. “People will complain that they don’t want to wait around for lightning to strike, but why not? If you invest yourself in chance, the potential for disappointment is pretty low.”

— John Darnielle

59. “I grew up in Southern California, so the whole concept of a local music history is still kinda novel to me.”

— John Darnielle

60. “I didn’t have a whole lot of friends anyway, so I didn’t feel abandoned so much as reminded.”

— John Darnielle

61. “I start writing, pull whatever images happen to occur to me and make up a story, instead of starting with details that are real and I know of and going from there.”

— John Darnielle

62. “Everything became infused with purpose. It’s hard to overstate how deep the need can get for things to make sense.”

— John Darnielle

63. “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.”

— John Darnielle

64. “I imagined a quiet future in an imaginary world where nothing ever really happened but everything seemed charged with life.”

— John Darnielle

65. “I don’t like to say, “Oh, I don’t like this kind of music.” I like to listen to it and try to see what people who like it get out of it.”

— John Darnielle

66. “It usually happens that I have multiple different projects going on at once, and one can be referencing the other.”

— John Darnielle

67. “I grew up around some people whose parents toured a lot: tough on the marriage, tough on the kids.”

— John Darnielle

68. “The reality of having a kid involves day-to-day practicality – not broader philosophical outlooks.”

— John Darnielle

69. “I’ll tell you later” is a contingent claim that can be rendered false by any of several moves.”

— John Darnielle

70. “I think it’s a misconception that metal’s about anger, obviously.”

— John Darnielle

71. “Music is a permanent art, it will always go through phases where you like it and are in tune with it, but saying that music “got bad” is infantile. The same is true with your life.”

— John Darnielle

72. “It’s in the nature of the landscape to change, and it’s in the nature of people to help the process along...”

— John Darnielle

73. “A bands first albums usually not great. When you made the first album, you had a day job and you were still trying to be serious about it.”

— John Darnielle

74. “In death metal, a lot of guys are Eddie Van Halen disciples, but they take his style to really expressionistic places. It’s a real pleasure for me to hear people pushing their craft.”

— John Darnielle

75. “People want you to play the songs they know. I try not to reflect too much, and I don’t really like to focus too much on myself.”

— John Darnielle

76. “Books are like rocks. You hold one in your hand and look at it in various lights to get a sense of it, and then when you get a good angle, you throw it through a window to see what happens.”

— John Darnielle

77. “I 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.”

— John Darnielle

78. “Here and there, alone, reflecting, I’d bump up against what felt like a buffer zone between me and some vast reserve of grief, but its reinforcements were sturdy enough and its construction solid enough to prevent me from really ever smelling its air, feeling its wind on my face.”

— John Darnielle

79. “Diagnoses exist to help get people services they need – but there’s no such thing as mental illness. We’re all mentally ill.”

— John Darnielle

80. “My 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, spectacularly.”

— John Darnielle

81. “My work is more important than I am. I’m just some guy.”

— John Darnielle

82. “Literature is a mystical place for me. It’s not dry. It’s where miracles happen.”

— John Darnielle

83. “My son, who sees me almost every day of his life, will look at me and go, “I know that dude! I like that dude!” It’s incredibly affirming.”

— John Darnielle

84. “If my songs are being listened to between any other songs, that is awesome, and I’m glad people are getting something out of them.”

— John Darnielle

85. “In the movies, people almost never talked about the towns they spent their lives in; they ran around having adventures and never stopped to get their bearings. It was weird, when you thought about it. They only remembered where they were from if they wanted to complain about how awful it was there, or, later, to remember it as a place of infinite promise, a place whose light had been hidden from them until it became unrecoverable, at which point its gleam would become impossible to resist.”

— John Darnielle

86. “The moment where you know the thing you want is ridiculous and pompous and a terrible thing to want anyway. The direction in which you’re headed is not the direction you want to go, yet you’re going to head that way a while longer cause that’s just the kind of person you are.”

— John Darnielle

87. “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.”

— John Darnielle

88. “I still get really excited looking at stuff that I’ve seen every day for 20 years.”

— John Darnielle

89. “I take the knife and stab myself in the neck. I bleed out on top of the fortune-teller’s grave and then I’m dead and that’s my game. I am OK and I’ll be OK but this is the end and this is my story. CH.”

— John Darnielle

90. “It’s hard to overstate how deep the need can get for things to make sense.”

— John Darnielle

91. “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.”

— John Darnielle

92. “There is something fierce and starved about first ideas.”

— John Darnielle

93. “Everybody experiences reality in a way that’s only true for them.”

— John Darnielle

94. “In wrestling, people just throw each other around, possibly actually bleed, and are still friends in the locker room afterwards. But there’s a real glee – a feeling goes up in the arena, especially on non-TV days. If it’s just people in a room and somebody starts to bleed, that’s very exciting.”

— John Darnielle

95. “I do have a romantic interest in outlasting everybody else. There’s a sort of sad machismo to singer-songwriters, I think.”

— John Darnielle

96. “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.”

— John Darnielle

97. “I couldn’t name more than a couple of good drum’n’bass acts, and I have no idea what’s big in the dance world right now.”

— John Darnielle

98. “I looked out through the window at the road that led from hideous rooms like this to a safe refuge hidden deep in the ground somewhere in Kansas.”

— John Darnielle

99. “From a very young age, I was the kind of kid you can just put anywhere and I’d still find stuff to be stoked about.”

— John Darnielle

100. “I’m kind of a hermit. Left to my own devices, I won’t submerge myself in anything further afield than the driveway.”

— John Darnielle