David Vann Quotes

Origins...They don't explain us, you know. They never do. Each of us is our own piece of work.

That's true. It doesn't make any sense. Welcome to the adult world, coming soon. I work so I can work more. I try not to want anything so maybe I'll get something. I starve so I can be less and more. I try to be free so I can be alone. And there's no point to any of it. They left out that part.

Anything is possible with a parent. Parents are gods. They make us and they destroy us. They warp the world and remake it in their own shape, and that's the world we know forever after. It's the only world. We can't see what it might have looked like otherwise.

Cutting through layers,this labor like cutting through the illusion of self to find there was no core, only the layers.

Why can't any common fuck be king?

There are no gods, only men.

Memories are infinitely richer than their origins, I discovered; to travel back can only estrange one even from memory itself. And because memory is often all that a life or a self is built on, returning home can take away exactly that.

A favored bit from "A Legend of Good Men"

"My mother and I each had our routines. She taught high school, took long hikes in the state parks near our house, read mystery novels, and sometimes disappeared with explanations as thin as, "I just need a few days," or "I'm going to visit a friend."
"Which friend?" I would ask.
"That's right," she would say.

I thought that was a wonderful idea, that one could be on hell without being in it, like "Just Visiting" on the Monopoly board.

This table felt extremely dangerous. He understood now that what held his family together was violence.

I've thought of it ever since, the idea that we don't stray far, that what feels like discovery is only the revealing of what was hidden but there, waiting. I remember because I think this might be a path to forgiveness, to realize that no matter how violent, how frightening my mother was, it was not random but at least partly inescapable, that who she was had been set in motion long before and she had to suffer that person as much as I did.

She has done this for Jason and will do more, she knows. Her brother dismembered at her feet. This is how the world begins.

He hadn't yet seen his life wasted, hadn't yet understood the pure longing for what was really a kind of annihilation. A desire to see what the world can do, to see what you can endure, to see, finally, what you're made of as you're torn apart. A kind of bliss to annihilation, to being wiped away. "But ever he has longing, he who sets out on the sea", and this longing is to face the very worst, a delicate hope for a larger wave.

We're not supposed to touch the dead. This is why we make a comfortable afterlife for them, so they will not reach out. We hope to distract them, keep them busy. Burial is a hope.

Each one a little bit different but following some blueprint somewhere. As if each of us might have a blueprint. As if somewhere there's the shape of my life, and I had the chance to choose a few variations, but not far from the pattern.

The point was the struggle. The earth thickened here so that he would labor. The shovel felt heavy so that he could feel he was doing something. The world provided resistance, and as we struggled through, we learned our final lessons.

Maybe this is as near as we can come to forgiveness. Not the past wiped away, nothing undone, but some willingness in the present, some recognition and embrace and slowing down.

History...to stand in a place and know that this where you come from for a dozen generations or maybe a hundred generations or maybe more. To know there was a great city two thousand years ago in this place, and that your ancestors helped build it and lived there and worked there. When you walk down a small road, all the others who are walking there with you from before.

the best choice we have on the menu tonight.

What's the point of sea horses? I asked.
The old man stood before them, mouth hung open, as if before his god.

If it had lips, we'd feel closer to it. All we need are eyes and lips, apparently, and we think we can say hello. I don't think I realized that before, how much we need the world to look like us.

As if somewhere there's the shape of my life, and I had the chance to choose a few variations, but not far from the pattern.I remember he said that, because I've thought of it ever since, the idea that we don't stray far, that what feels like discovery is only the revealing of what was hidden but there, waiting.

If enough people repeat the stories for long enough, Jason will become something that cannot die, but he also will have been erased, because the actions are too large and impersonal. The stories will reveal nothing about the real man who lived.

The dead reaching for us, needing us, but this isn't true. There's only us reaching for them, trying to find ourselves.

Absurdity is all that makes grief bearable

We live through evolution ourselves, each of us, progressing through different apprehensions of the world, at each age forgetting the last age, every previous mind erased. We no longer see the same world at all.

Medea is without words, without thought. She has unstrung the world, pulled some vital thread and unraveled all. Nothing to do now but hold her breath and find out whether a new world re-forms.

One life can never know another's.