Top 160 John Darnielle Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “I enjoy hearing people who are good at their instruments and who’ve found a distinctive voice.”

— John Darnielle

102. “I’m not really a goal-oriented guy. I started doing the Mountain Goats just for the sheer hell of it.”

— John Darnielle

103. “There are so many different kinds of ghosts.”

— John Darnielle

104. “When all my friends insisted that they were feeling jaded, it struck me as an affected pose. To me, everything is always new.”

— John Darnielle

105. “I was little the first time I heard the term “ghost town”; I fell immediately in love.”

— John Darnielle

106. “If you get into a fight and somebody punches you, you get two feelings. One: That really hurts. Two: That relief in the realness of, like, Wow, this is what it is. It’s not an intellectual process.”

— John Darnielle

107. “In a movie version of this scene the driver wheels his glance abruptly to the window where a misshapen man stands watching it all unfold, and fixes me with a threatening look. That didn’t happen.”

— John Darnielle

108. “I think The Sunset Tree is really the album on which I really learned to trust other musicians, which is so important.”

— John Darnielle

109. “They don’t know they have expectations, but I show them by counterexample what their expectations were.”

— John Darnielle

110. “I always worry that I’m a dilettante: I know something about lots of things but don’t have exhaustive knowledge of much.”

— John Darnielle

111. “I think listening to a lot of Lou Reed when I was a teenager is what encouraged me to just sing however felt good to me.”

— John Darnielle

112. “I don’t write my own publicity materials, I just read ’em and give ’em the OK.”

— John Darnielle

113. “And then I played some music, old music, and it sounded awful, and I loved it, I loved it so much.”

— John Darnielle

114. “That’s what pictures are for, after all: to stand in place of the things that weren’t left behind, to bear witness to people and places and things that might otherwise go unnoticed.”

— John Darnielle

115. “I think I read too much Arthur Conan Doyle when I was young, and got this idea that a gentleman should know a lot about one thing and plenty about most everything else.”

— John Darnielle

116. “You can get into anything if you are determined. I always thought that with music, too.”

— John Darnielle

117. “There are planets so far away from ours that no scientist will ever guess that they exits, let alone know the stories of their civilizations, their beginnings and ends. They’re not being kept secret from us, but they’re secret all the same.”

— John Darnielle

118. “The process of touring is always so weird to me. Once you’ve made the album, that’s over, you move along.”

— John Darnielle

119. “You don’t think about how you really have your whole life planned out until a part of it goes missing suddenly one day.”

— John Darnielle

120. “Their grief wasn’t his to bear, he knew. But it was inside him all the same, like a secret entrusted to a messenger.”

— John Darnielle

121. “You could hear, in the questions they asked and how they asked them, that there were right answers, things they wanted to hear.”

— John Darnielle

122. “Working efficiently while a movie played was second nature to her by now, more comfortable than silence.”

— John Darnielle

123. “I consider myself a lyricist first and foremost, but if you get something else out of what I do, that’s fine too. I’m not sitting back here telling people how they have to take my stuff. We just want to play music, and hope that people like it.”

— John Darnielle

124. “For me, moving is always a big opportunity. Its just a enough of a shift in outlook that every time I move, it seems to open something up.”

— John Darnielle

125. “As an artist, you always have to be growing. You don’t just want to do what you already know people like.”

— John Darnielle

126. “Everybody is in various states of needing to transcend something. I believe in mental health care, but when we call people “crazy,” we exclude them from our circle.”

— John Darnielle

127. “I had this rising premonition about him turning to look over at me, catching me in the act of sort of staring at him for no reason. It was a premonition with texture and heft, something I could almost taste; in my mind I saw his head begin to turn, casually, gradually but decisively, until his eyes found mine and held them. I stood ready for this to happen, wondering what I’d do, but he stayed put.”

— John Darnielle

128. “I knew she wanted to ask what I was doing, but I had the advantage. Nobody liked to see me speak.”

— John Darnielle

129. “It’s hard always to say what it is one likes about a place, for me. I feel it.”

— John Darnielle

130. “Take dance music: I like enough of it and its history to be able to say a word or two about this or that record, but I’m nobody’s authority.”

— John Darnielle

131. “Came all this way and now here I am.”

— John Darnielle

132. “I 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

133. “I just started going to shows. I don’t know how submerged I am: I feel guilty that I don’t get out more, but I really like being inside the house.”

— John Darnielle

134. “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.”

— John Darnielle

135. “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.”

— John Darnielle

136. “Forever is a question you start asking when you look at the ceiling.”

— John Darnielle

137. “I’ll keep making records until I don’t have more ideas for records.”

— John Darnielle

138. “A farmhouse has a way of feeling both timeless and impermanent without ever committing to either side.”

— John Darnielle

139. “People bring you books, cheap paperbacks, when you’re in the hospital: this was how I found out that I hate mystery novels.”

— John Darnielle

140. “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.”

— John Darnielle

141. “To 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

142. “The fact that somebody’s telling you a story about people who didn’t exist doesn’t make the experience of the story any less real in your heart and mind.”

— John Darnielle

143. “I think taking too long to work on a record you sort of lose some of the feeling, so I write as fast as I can; it’s just this manic phase where I’m by myself and or on tour and I write and I write. And I send them to the guys, and we start planning our studio ventures.”

— John Darnielle

144. “From an early age, you’d been in love with the world: there was so much in it, a life so full of surprises if you only stayed open to them, ready to receive the transmissions when they came. A devotee of the chance encounter, the found pleasure, the happy accident, your eyes always open, trying to spread some of your inner light around: that was you, the you everyone knew.”

— John Darnielle

145. “Now the birth of Gorbonian was as follows. His father the King, having defended his counties against the Flemish invaders, brought upon the land a time of feasting and plenty; and tribute did issue from the land all round, in gratitude to King Morvidus, who, though his mother had come from some far country, none knew which, did now guard his kingdom from marauders. And the people did say, that there was none so worthy as King.”

— John Darnielle

146. “Another nagging little question lodged like a bit of grapeshot in his chest. It was nothing major, but the place where he stored them all was running out of room.”

— John Darnielle

147. “That’s the thing, those of us on this side of the disaster, we get so dazzled by the fireworks, by the conflagration I want to say, that we don’t see the gigantic expanse over there on the other side of the flames, but, you know. People have to live there.”

— John Darnielle

148. “But few things, at any rate, are more powerful than expectations. Blunt force, maybe. Firepower, certainly. Sword and steel. But even those have their limits. The imagination has none.”

— John Darnielle

149. “It’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

150. “They always arrive at the same questions – why don’t these young people care? how did they get like this? where were their parents? – but the asking of these questions is an exercise in self-portraiture. They’re not good questions; they’re not even questions. They’re ghost stories masquerading as concern.”

— John Darnielle