John Darnielle Quotes

When the last days come
We shall see visions
More vivid than sunsets
Brighter than stars
We will recognize each other
And see ourselves for the first time
The way we really are

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.

It's just being who you want to be, even if you are a poor kid making loud music
about being unhappy!

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.

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

I think all writing is necessarily autobiographical to a greater or lesser extent, and the less it tries to be confessional, the more likely it is that you're somehow sneaking the things you need to say in there.

It's not that nobody ever gets away: that's not true. It's that you carry it with you. It doesn't matter that the days roll on like hills too low to give names to; they might be of use later, so you keep them. You replay them to keep their memory alive. It feels worthwhile because it is.

Sometimes I do 'So Desperate' solo in the middle of the set. I really love to sing that song.

Younger songwriters will ask me, 'What did you do?' And it's like, 'Well, I worked a day job, and I didn't stake anything. I didn't quit my day job. I didn't have any hopes at all. I just did the thing that I believed in, and I waited a long time.'

I come from Chino, so all your threats are empty.

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

I was a huge comic book fan. It's weird because the era of 'Marvel' I was into turns out to be very important in the long run, but it's not the one that anybody romanticizes.

It is hard to leave home, and sometimes it takes a long time. *

I'll keep making records until I don't have more ideas for records.

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.

A player's first move isn't necessarily the truest or clearest view of that person I'll get, but it's often the most naked, because it takes a while to situate yourself within an imaginary landscape. When you respond to the initial subscriber packet with your opening move - when you come to the bridge - you haven't had a chance to get much sense of the game's rhythms, so you're awkward, halting, more likely to overplay your hand. The open path at the overpass gives way to grand schemes, huge, multipart responses, whole narratives from within the canvas newly forming inside the player's imagination. I keep myself out of it; I interpret and react, like a flowchart responding flatly to a person who's asking it how to live.

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.

May we all emerge from winter with our strength renewed and any unwanted pieces left under the ice.

I still get really excited looking at stuff that I've seen every day for 20 years.

I had a funny feeling that day, all day: something about how much I liked my life and where I was with it.

More and more, I enjoy hearing people who are good at their instruments and who've found a distinctive voice. 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.

I am a person of high energy. That, and I sit down and I write when I get an idea - I put other things aside.

There's the dual challenge of wanting to speak from an authentic place, and then being able to be honest about it. Even in the most mannered art, I think that's what people value, is a voice that comes from a real place.

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.

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.

The more I learn about stuff the more conscious I become of grave gaps in my knowledge.

There's this idea that there was a point in our childhood when we were in some way better than we are now and we should try to hang on to that.

I think I am a religious person just by nature. I think I sort of view everything through the lens of some inner undying thing in people that drives them to act as they do or to feel ashamed of not acting in some other way.

There's no such thing as mental illness. We're all mentally ill and we're all haunted by something, and some people manage to find a way to ride it out so that they don't wind up needing extra help. So I think that "mental illness," as a term, is garbage. Everybody is in various states of needing to transcend something.

Life is entirely unthinkable without any of the creative arts, and they're all a continuum - the force in question is creativity, not its mode of expression.

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.

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

I used to assume no one would care, but I do think now I've written songs that are useful to people having dark hours.

My capacity for vanishing into whatever shadows happen to be around is a hard-won and precious skill.

I've written a lot about southern California, but I don't use the same characters. Leave the people in the songs in the songs, is my philosophy.

I just started writing stuff to kill time on summer evenings. This is why I'm always telling people who ask me what they need to do to succeed to give up, do something else.

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.

No way of counting my blessings. No way for anyone to count that high.

One way you can get really close to God is to sin as hard as you can.

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

The inside of the Trace Italian, of course, does not exist. A player can get close enough to see it: it shines in the new deserts of Kansas, gleaming in the sun or starkly rising from the winter cold. The rock walls that protect it meet in points around it, one giving way to another, for days on end. But the dungeons into which you'll fall as you work through the pathways to its gates number in the low hundreds, and if you actually get into the entry hall, there are a few hundred more sub-dungeons before you'll actually reach somewhere that's truly safe. Technically, it's possible to get to the last room in the final chamber of the Trace Italian, but no one will ever do it. No one will ever live that long.

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

I don't even want to be rich I just want to be alone.

Wrestlers give their bodies to their work. I don't know if I like the word 'crazy' here. What I would say is there are people who have a different relationship to their bodies than most people.

I'm sort of a cavedweller: I miss my house, my yard, my kitchen, my wife. The trees. When I get home, I like to get down into my office neighborhood as soon as I can.

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

This is why people cry at the movies: because everybody's doomed. No one in a movie can help themselves in any way. Their fate has already staked its claim on them from the moment they appear onscreen.

Sometimes I feel very young, and other times I feel like the side of a ship that's got a bunch of layers of mussels and barnacles on it.

I am permanently a student of people who make great songs, but besides sort of learning by absorption, I just love listening to music, hearing what's going on, hearing new things or new old things.

Their boots were black and shiny and your treasures gleamed like stars,
Bones from deep down in the fertile crescent.

My strongest hope is for a cameo as a band playing in a club visited by the detectives on 'Law & Order: SVU' during the course of an investigation, maybe during sound check, or something, so they can force us to stop playing while they question the sound guy.

For me, moving is always a big opportunity. It's just a enough of a shift in outlook that every time I move, it seems to open something up.

I will go where I will go
And I will jettison all dead weight
And I will use these words for kindling
And I will sleep by the garden gate.

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.

I want to make sure people know I don't think I have any magic powers. I just have a story that I share.

I used to break three or four strings a night, and the show would be over because I didn't know how to change the strings.

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.

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.

I think wrestling is the one that presents theater for people who want to see some theater but don't necessarily have to dress up or be quiet while they're watching.

People have ideas and theories about coping with catastrophic injury, but most of them are based in practicalities. They're right in thinking that the practicalities - how will you live? what will you do? - are important, but these aren't the main thing. The main thing is what happens to your vision, how you're a little different after you've seen a few things, and as far as I know, nobody really gets this,

I think youth will always be connected to the strongest music at the time because ... I don't want to use the word 'tribal,' but there was this sort of familial affiliation that people would feel with the music they were listening to.

Adulthood is interesting to adults. But I would never want to write about stuff I don't feel everybody can connect to.

Everybody experiences reality in a way that's only true for them.

They were smoking cigarettes in the deliberate self-conscious way of smoking teenagers:

I always want to try and see what the appeal is in anything. It's the healthiest and most honest approach.

I have remade myself; or I am no one, driving a delivery van carrying boxes of electronics from nowhere to no place, the road empty before me by day, shared by headless headlights after dark, beams increasing briefly and then gone, beyond, somewhere off in the cross-traffic, catchable in the rearview if I dare. I thrive. I fail to thrive. I fall. I rise. Too many. Too late. Not that, not those, not these: this.

I pretty much just focus on making the records - unless I'm self-releasing them; then I do my own thing. But at some point, you have to stop worrying about chains of distribution, or it takes out of your time to write.

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.

But resiliency only means that a thing retains its shape. That it doesn't break, or lose its ability to function. It doesn't mean a child forgets the time she shared in the backyard with her mother gardening, or the fun they had together watching Bedknobs and Broomsticks at the Astro. It just means she learns to bear it. The mechanism that allowed Lisa Sample to keep her head above water in the wake of her mother's departure has not been described or cataloged by scientists. It's efficient, and flexible, and probably transferable from one person to another should they catch the scent on each other. But the rest of the details about it aren't observable from the outside. You have to be closer than you really want to get to see how it works.

But people underestimate just how starved everybody is for some magic pathway back into childhood.

I am at a place in my life where the more like a cave I can make my surroundings, the happier I am.

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

My feminism is what came squarely up against my faith. There's a lot of ecstatic post-patriarchal Christians who have stuff they do with that. But at that point, you're doing Christianity with a double-superscript. The Bible, and especially the book of Genesis, is pretty unapologetically patriarchal.

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

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.

The most remarkable thing about you standing in the doorway is that it's you, and that you're standing in the doorway.

I hope I get to watch porn with you, Abs?" he said, eyebrows up. "Am I hearing this right? I just want to make sure I understand what it is you imagine I'm thinking." She

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.

It's not my style to be thinking about what a record is while I'm making it: I just write songs.

When I was kid, they always used to tell me to keep notebooks. I look at my shelves now and it's just nothing but notebooks. And if I haven't gotten an idea but I have time to work, I'll pull one out and I bet there will be five or six sentences that will kick me off.

Who knows the secrets of anybody's heart.

Something I've learned being in this industry for so long is that if you want to work with somebody, call them up. Very few musicians have any illusions about genre boundaries. They are useful descriptive terms, but they don't really bind musicians.

Literature is a mystical place for me. It's not dry. It's where miracles happen.

I watched 'Fame,' and I just love the choreography. It just gives me a place to be in another zone.

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

The better I get at writing songs, the harder it seems to be to relate to people. But when I get on stage, I'm extremely happy.

If you show up to work five days in a row, nobody's going to pat you on the back - everyone does that. Well, do that with your writing. Just show up. Be there for it. When you get an idea, write it down somewhere and then be a steward of that idea.

Gender relations are a sad story of men talking trash about women all over the world.

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.

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.

I hang out and sign records for an hour or two hours every night, and I like to hear as many people's stories as I can, because if somebody wants to share their story with me, I want to honor that.

It's hard to stay positive when there's a lot of evil in the world.

Once you start talking to people, you find out there's a lot more wrestling fans than you think there are.

There are only two stories: either you go forward or you die.

I remember this scene because it was embarrassing to live through it, and because remembering it is a way of knowing that I am half-true to my beliefs when the time comes. I sit silently defending them and I don't sell them out, but I put on a face that lets people think I'm on the winning team, that I'm laughing along with them instead of just standing among them. I save the best parts for myself and savor them in silence. Number three, power of flight. Number four, marauder. Enough vision to really see something. A stack of gold coins and a ledger. People want all kinds of things out of life, I knew early on.

My favorite movies are gory horror films. I love Faulkner. I wanted to see the most painful things possible.

A band's first album's usually not great. When you made the first album, you had a day job and you were still trying to be serious about it.

I can feel it in the rotten air tonight/ In the tips of my fingers, in the skin on my face/ In the weak last gasp of the evening's dying light/ In the way those eyes I've always loved illuminate this place/ Like a trashcan fire in a prison cell/ Like the searchlights in the parking lots of hell/ I will walk down to the end with you/ If you will come all the way down with me

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.

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