Top 300 Joseph Fink Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 6 of 7

251. “Inside she would be a vessel of fluids and mourning.”

— Joseph Fink

252. “She had recently turned nineteen. She had been recently nineteen for as long as she could remember. The pawnshop had been hers for a long time, centuries maybe. Clocks and calendars don’t work in Night Vale. Time itself doesn’t work.”

— Joseph Fink

253. “City halls are always huge and ornate and topped with ancient volcanic stone towers.”

— Joseph Fink

254. “Who can fathom the danger and pain of a visit to the City Council?”

— Joseph Fink

255. “There was a black sedan with tinted windows at the end of the lot – the windows cracked down enough for her to see two sunglassed agents of a vague yet menacing government agency watching her intently. One of them had a camera that kept going off, but the agent didn’t seem to know how to deactivate the flash. The light against the tinted windows made the shots worthless, and the agent cursed and tried again and it flashed again. Jackie waved good night to them, as she always did.”

— Joseph Fink

256. “It would be safe to assume that the house is an enclosed structure owned and built by people. It would be weird to assume that the house has a personality, a soul. Why would anyone assume that? It is true. It does. But that was weird to assume that. Never assume that kind of thing.”

— Joseph Fink

257. “Some days the weather happens and we never look up or go outside and that’s okay too.”

— Joseph Fink

258. “Aren’t we all, metaphorically, just looking for a bathroom?”

— Joseph Fink

259. “Nilanjana had considered only a tiny portion of true things in a world that is made almost entirely of them.”

— Joseph Fink

260. “Be proud of your place in the cosmos. It is small, and yet it is. How unlikely! How fantastic!”

— Joseph Fink

261. “I will find the man in the tan jacket, and I will make him take this piece of paper back,” she announced. “If I could do that without having to learn anything about him or about what the paper means, that would be just ideal.” The agents in the car, holding index fingers to earpieces, dutifully wrote this down.”

— Joseph Fink

262. “The ocean is full of things that would like to kill you. And other things that would ignore or not understand you, and then eventually kill you. Because they do not have the same understanding or valuation of life and death as humans. There are still other things that you would probably kill, simply because you think they are beautiful, and you want to possess beautiful things because you believe that beauty and sentience are mutually exclusive.”

— Joseph Fink

263. “All information was important information, even if the reasons were not immediately apparent.”

— Joseph Fink

264. “Ah, it says that the City Council believes the reason for the violent reaction of the Shape Formerly in Grove Park that No One Acknowledges or Speaks about is because I have been acknowledging and speaking about it, which has made it angry. They urge me to stop speaking of it, and never do it again, and in exchange they’ll move it somewhere else so we can get our front loading zone back.”

— Joseph Fink

265. “Diane was gasping and slowing, cursing years of intended workouts that had never happened.”

— Joseph Fink

266. “But life solves all our problems against our will.”

— Joseph Fink

267. “Before you can offer Jackie your item, there will first be some hand washing, which is why there are bowls of purified water throughout your shop. You need to chant a little as you wash your hands. You, of course, should always chant when you wash your hands. It is only hygienic.”

— Joseph Fink

268. “She couldn’t go home. Because home wasn’t a place. Home was a person. And she hadn’t found that person yet.”

— Joseph Fink

269. “Diane sometimes hears that Troy is an actuary. Sometimes she hears Troy is a florist. Sometimes she hears Troy is a cop, a toll collector, a professor, a musician, a stand-up comedian. Once, she heard a terrible rumor he became a librarian but she could not imagine Troy becoming the darkest of evil beasts no matter what he had done to her. Is it even possible for a human to become a librarian?”

— Joseph Fink

270. “People arrived in town all the time. It wasn’t that distant from other places, and it was along a major thoroughfare. There was a Taco Bell where people could pee. There was a gas station where people could pee. There were all sorts of things.”

— Joseph Fink

271. “There was a girl Josh liked who only liked Josh when he was bipedal. Josh does not like always being bipedal and found this news disappointing. There was a boy Josh liked who liked Josh when he was a cute animal. Josh always likes being a cute animal, but Josh’s subjective sense of the word cute was different from the boy’s. This was another disappointment for Josh, and also for the boy, who did not find giant centipedes cute at all.”

— Joseph Fink

272. “If you’re going to learn to drive, you’re going to need to be able to reach the pedals.” The wolf spider elongated, and two of his middle legs extended to the floor of the vehicle, gently touching the pedals. “And see the road too, Josh.” A human head with the face and hair of a fifteen-year-old boy emerged from the body of the spider, and the abdomen filled out into something of a primate-like torso.”

— Joseph Fink

273. “Her mother had called, and being a good daughter was as convenient an excuse as any. Anything to avoid the library.”

— Joseph Fink

274. “I’m highly contagious, quarantined to another body I’ve since infected. I will seep into you if you hold me too tightly.”

— Joseph Fink

275. “He recognized them for what they were: humans, who were right about some things and wrong about other things and certain about everything.”

— Joseph Fink

276. “Her mother rolled an avocado back and forth on the spotless tabletop. The floor and the tabletop and the walls were all the same clean color, and everything was equally clean and unused. The avocado was, of course, fake, as all avocados were.”

— Joseph Fink

277. “To the family and friends of Intern Jodi: She will be missed. Especially since she alphabetized herself early in the process, and so most of the station still needs doing. If you need college credit or a place to hide from the dangerous world outside, come on down to the station today, and start a long and healthy life in radio.”

— Joseph Fink

278. “I don’t have to keep trying. Remember that, I say to myself, as I keep trying.”

— Joseph Fink

279. “Talking about this made Jackie feel like she was looking down from somewhere high, or like she was staring straight up at a cloudless point of sky.”

— Joseph Fink

280. “Ford. Our cars are built strong. Our cars are built out of bones. Weird metal bones that we found buried in a meteor. Ford: Drive Weird Bones.”

— Joseph Fink

281. “That’s it from me for now, listeners. But something in me says that this is no ending. The night outside is bright and breezy and full of dangerous secrets. There is a taste in the air like tarnished silver, like the flesh of an extinct animal now only remembered through our spinal cord and the hairs on our back.”

— Joseph Fink

282. “You will know recycling has been picked up because your recycling bags will be gone and there will be a large, reddish brown smear across your front door roughly in the shape of an X. Or maybe it’s a cross. It’s not clear in the brochure I’ve been handed, which has no words, only dark black-and-white photographs of angled shadows along brick walls. I mean, municipal one-sheets are kind of useless, but this one is at least haunting.”

— Joseph Fink

283. “A human head with the face and hair of a fifteen-year-old boy emerged form the body of the spider, and the abdomen filled out into something of a primate-like torso. The legs remained spindly and long. He thought he looked cool driving a car as a wolf spider. He did look cool, although it was difficult to control the car. It was important to him that he look cool while driving, although he would not have been able to articulate why.”

— Joseph Fink

284. “So look at the fleeting stars with fleeting eyes, and feel how the earth beneath you gives. It is all a temporary manifestation of particles, and it is all unraveling back to particulate silence. The bustle of the human day will come and will go. And then there will be night.”

— Joseph Fink

285. “It didn’t matter what he said. The world is terrifying. It always is. But Cecil reminded her that it was ok to relax in a terrifying world.”

— Joseph Fink

286. “As the saying goes, ‘Those who fail to understand history are doomed, as are those who do understand it.”

— Joseph Fink

287. “Even angels are afraid,” said Jackie.”

— Joseph Fink

288. “She felt old, looked young, was neither.”

— Joseph Fink

289. “The scientists nodded and wrote on their clipboards. All information was important information, even if the reasons were not immediately apparent. The reason for anything was rarely immediately or even eventually apparent, but it existed somewhere, like a moon that had escaped orbit and was no longer a moon but just a piece of something that once was, spinning off into the nothing. The scientists were just then writing down that very metaphor. Metaphors are a big part of science.”

— Joseph Fink

290. “But, as you watch the sun rise again tomorrow morning, think to yourself: past performance is not a predictor of future results. And then force a smile, drink another cup of coffee, and try not to look down as you walk across the soil that will eventually fill your lifeless lungs and repurpose your corpse.”

— Joseph Fink

291. “Stay tuned next for our countdown of last words, from “Stop telling me how to drive” all the way to “It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay.”

— Joseph Fink

292. “People die all the time for all different kinds of reasons. I wouldn’t worry if I were you.”

— Joseph Fink

293. “The library will be under a sort of renovation. It is not important what kind of renovation.”

— Joseph Fink

294. “It’s a long and desolate way from Florida to Atlanta. The landscape is constructed of billboards.”

— Joseph Fink

295. “His love had felt so genuine, but poison sometimes tastes sweet.”

— Joseph Fink

296. “Your music, your lyrics, the leaden prose of your life that proves that everything you are and are not, the structures you build to make futility seem like meaning, the dead and living – who will soon be dead, who will soon be gone, who will soon be smoke – rising in columns and forming clouds in the night sky. For now and ever, by the will of dead and dying gods.”

— Joseph Fink

297. “It made Keisha feel like there was no center to it all, and that what had seemed to be the world was only a temporary arrangement of light.”

— Joseph Fink

298. “You are home,” I said, meaning this house, meaning this town, meaning us, meaning our lives together, meaning I was afraid too, but we could be afraid together.”

— Joseph Fink

299. “We all don’t get happy lives. Maybe a happy life doesn’t exist, at least not as some complete, discrete entity. We get what we get and we sort through how we feel about it moment by moment.”

— Joseph Fink

300. “Whoever you are now, you are home.”

— Joseph Fink