Top 120 Mark Z. Danielewski Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The greatest of love letters are always coded for the one and not the many.”

— Mark Z. Danielewski

52. “Stars to live by. Stars to steer by. Stars to die by.”

— Mark Z. Danielewski

53. “Even the brightest magnesium flare can do little against such dark except blind the eyes of the one holding it. Thus one craves what by seeing one has in fact not seen.”

— Mark Z. Danielewski

54. “I miss you. I love you. There’s no second I’ve lived you can’t call your own.”

— Mark Z. Danielewski

55. “I do not know anything about Art with a capital A. What I do know about is my art. Because it concerns me. I do not speak for others. So I do not speak for things which profess to speak for others. My art, however, speaks for me. It lights my way.”

— Mark Z. Danielewski

56. “Explanation is not half as strong as experience but experience is not half as strong as experience and understanding.”

— Mark Z. Danielewski

57. “Do not wake me from this slumber, but be assured that just as I have wept much, I have also wandered many roads with my thoughts.”

— Mark Z. Danielewski

58. “Write what you love. Love will hold you through the hard times and hold the world during the good times.”

— Mark Z. Danielewski

59. “Ever see yourself doing something in the past and no matter how many times you remember it you still want to scream stop, somehow redirect the action, reorder the present?”

— Mark Z. Danielewski

60. “Everyone loves the Dream but I kill it.”

— Mark Z. Danielewski

61. “Let the cold water run. It’s gotta warm up eventually. Right?”

— Mark Z. Danielewski

62. “What can I say, I’m a sucker for abandoned stuff, misplaced stuff, forgotten stuff, any old stuff which despite the light of progress and all that, still vanishes every day like shadows at noon, goings unheralded, passings unourned, well, you get the drift.”

— Mark Z. Danielewski

63. “Is it possible to love something so much, you imagine it wants to destroy you only because it has denied you?”

— Mark Z. Danielewski

64. “How do we remember this emptiness so in fullness we won’t forget?”

— Mark Z. Danielewski

65. “Literature is capable of being a subject that people want to catch up on or discuss, whether at a coffee shop or a watercooler. It can become an intrinsic part of their dialogue.”

— Mark Z. Danielewski

66. “Immensely clever story, and quite creepy, in a delightfully scary way.”

— Mark Z. Danielewski

67. “I had one woman come up to me in a bookstore and say, ‘You know, everyone told me it was a horror book, but when I finished it, I realized that it was a love story.’ And she’s absolutely right. In some ways, genre is a marketing tool.”

— Mark Z. Danielewski

68. “So often I wonder whether it is my right to capitalize, as I feel, so often, on the grief of others. But then I justify, in my own particular thoughts, by feeling that I can contribute a little to the understanding of what others are going through; then there is reason for doing it.”

— Mark Z. Danielewski

69. “My hands resemble some ancient tree: the roots that bind up the earth, the rock and the ceaselessly nibbling wordms.”

— Mark Z. Danielewski

70. “Also remember, love inhabits more than just the heart and mind. If need be it can take shelter in a big toe.”

— Mark Z. Danielewski

71. “Come morning I found the day as I have found every other day – without relief or explanation.”

— Mark Z. Danielewski

72. “Here then – the after math of meaning. A liftime finished between the space of two frames.”

— Mark Z. Danielewski

73. “To read” actually comes from the Latin reri “to calculate, to think” which is not only the progenitor of “read” but of “reason” as well, both of which hail from the Greek arariskein “to fit.” Aside from giving us “reason,” arariskein also gives us an unlikely sibling, Latin arma meaning “weapons.” It seems that “to fit” the world or to make sense of it requires either reason or arms.”

— Mark Z. Danielewski

74. “Our newness lies only in parts rearranged.”

— Mark Z. Danielewski

75. “Not only had Navidson carried Karen out of that house, he had picked her up a hundred times over the course of eleven years and carried her fear, her torment, and her distance.”

— Mark Z. Danielewski

76. “Even the closest relationships that I have I know could potentially fall away. That’s not to speak pessimistically or negatively about those relationships. In a weird way, it’s the opposite. I value them.”

— Mark Z. Danielewski

77. “But tomorrow came faster than expected, as if the future were never somewhere else, but all along part of the fabric of every present, merely untwining itself again and again into a new distinction that could never be new again.”

— Mark Z. Danielewski

78. “For some reason, I’ve been thinking more and more about my mother and the way her life failed her, humiliated her with impulses beyond her command, broke her with year after year of the same.”

— Mark Z. Danielewski

79. “The thread has snapped. No sound even to mark the breaking let alone the fall. That long anticipated disintegration, when the darkest angel of all, the horror beyond all horrors, sits at last upon my chest, permanently enfolding me in its great covering wings, black as ink, veined in Bees’ purple. A creature without a voice. A voice without a name. As immortal as my life. Come here at long last to summon the wind.”

— Mark Z. Danielewski

80. “Stories heard but not recalled. Letters too. Words filling my head. Fragmenting like artillery shells. Shrapnel, like syllables, flying everywhere. Terrible syllables. Sharp cracked. Traveling at murderous speed. Tearing through it all in a very, very bad inreparable way.”

— Mark Z. Danielewski

81. “We did not just go to the stars. We became the stars.”

— Mark Z. Danielewski

82. “Aside from recurrance, revision, and commensurate symbolic reference, echoes also reveal emptiness. Since objects always impede acoustic reflection, only empty places can create echoes of lasting clarity.”

— Mark Z. Danielewski

83. “Love’s love in her blackest season.”

— Mark Z. Danielewski

84. “No gunfire, famine, or flies. Just lots of toothpaste, gardening and people stuff.”

— Mark Z. Danielewski

85. “To repeat: her voice has life. It possesses a quality not present in the original, revealing how a nymph can return a different and more meaningful story, in spite of telling the same story.”

— Mark Z. Danielewski

86. “It’s a nice idea but it reeks of hope. False hope.”

— Mark Z. Danielewski

87. “I must read. I must read. I must read.”

— Mark Z. Danielewski

88. “Of course curiosity killed the cat, and even if satisfaction supposedly brought it back, there’s still that little problem with the man on the radio telling me more and more about some useless information.”

— Mark Z. Danielewski

89. “He is a stem, a husk, barren and thin, withered by sun, erased by wind, emptied by seasons of dullness, marked by seconds of duty, scarred by regret only the faintest of lines dare to write out, which no one, not even him, can interpret anymore. People have told him a crow will reveal more than anything his face has to share.”

— Mark Z. Danielewski

90. “I’m so tired. Sleep’s been stalking me for too long to remember. Inevitable I suppose.”

— Mark Z. Danielewski

91. “He loved more than anything to fly. His sole conflict was with gravity.”

— Mark Z. Danielewski

92. “Sometimes how you talk is all you got. Even if your talk is wrong.”

— Mark Z. Danielewski

93. “Also remember, love inhabits more than just the heart and mind.”

— Mark Z. Danielewski

94. “The world only mattered because people lived there and sometimes, in spite of the pain, tragedy, and degradation, even managed to triumph there.”

— Mark Z. Danielewski

95. “It is understood that the world does not want to be understood. The world would not be this world if it did.”

— Mark Z. Danielewski

96. “If one invests some interest in, for example, a tree and begins to form some thoughts about this tree then writes these thoughts down, further examining the meanings that surface, allowing for unconscious associations to take place, writing all this down as well, until the subject of the tree branches off into the subject of the shelf, that person will enjoy immense psychological benefits.”

— Mark Z. Danielewski

97. “I’m not independently wealthy.”

— Mark Z. Danielewski

98. “I live at the end of some interminable corridor which the lucky damned can call hell but which the much unluckier atheists – and your mother heads up that bunch- must simply get used to calling home.”

— Mark Z. Danielewski

99. “How then do you fly from that path?”

— Mark Z. Danielewski

100. “Of course real horror does not depend upon the melodrama of shadows or even the conspiracies of night.”

— Mark Z. Danielewski