Wendelin Van Draanen Quotes

Over and over again, I'm trying to express or communicate these big and small struggles to the world, and really to myself.

As a son of a man who pretended to be one thing for 33 years of my life and then was another thing, the questions of 'what is real' and 'what is not real' are very blurrily vivid to me.

Give me life, give me pain, give me myself again.

Who you are vs. who you wish you were: Who wins?

Those darker sides, the things that we don't want to admit about ourselves - that's what excites me.

You once liked the blissful mobility, but then you wonder, who's the real you? And who's the chap on the screen? You know, I catch myself acting out my life like a goddamn script.

I felt it was my duty to praise all of God's works with fervent enthusiasm. At the same time I killed flies in my house in a spirit of hatred, exasperation and contempt. My praise to God for all his works was dishonest, the act of killing the fly was honest.

We discover that we do not know our role; we look for a mirror; we want to remove our make-up and take off what is false and real. But somewhere a piece of disguise that we forgot still sticks to us. A trace of exaggeration remains in our eyebrows; we do not notice that the corners of our mouth are bent. And so we walk around, a mockery and a mere half: neither having achieved being nor actors.

I am never more myself than in my self-betrayals.

If it suddenly became impossible for us to cover up all the junk we normally hide from the rest of humanity, I have a feeling we would all get real motivated to deal with the source of what ails us.

Early in my career I was divided because I had the real self underneath: the lawbreaker, the anarchist, the person who swims against the tide, the outsider, the loner, all of that guy. He was my private self, and I had this other side that wanted to be liked in order to do all those things I dreamed of as a little boy. I didn't realize that those things didn't go together until later. And I'm quite sure that my use of acid and peyote helped me accept what was really going on inside of me instead of what I had imposed on myself.

He wanted to be loved for being just what he was. In this community of Yskalnari there was harmony, but no love. He no longer wanted to be the greatest, strongest or cleverest. He had left all that far behind. He longed to be loved just as he was, good or bad, handsome or ugly, clever or stupid, with all his faults - or possibly because of them. But what was he actually? He no longer knew. So much have been given to him in Fantastica, and now, among all these gifts and powers, he could no longer find himself.

I spent so many years trying to become an actor, trying to be a person that I wasn't.

How could I have thought that I needed to cure myself in order to fit into the 'real' world? I didn't need curing, and the world didn't, either; the only thing that did need curing was my understanding of my place in it. Without that understanding - without a sense of belonging to the real world - it was impossible to thrive in an imagined one.

My toughest enemy is in the mirror - would you look at that.

The girl in the mirror wasn't who I wanted to be and her life wasn't the one I wanted to have.

My abyss speaks, I have turned my ultimate depth inside out into the light.

For years, copying other people, I tried to know myself. From within, I couldn't decide what to do. Unable to see, I heard my name being called. Then I walked outside.

One must know oneself as one is, not as one wishes to be, which is merely an ideal and therefore fictitious, unreal; it is only that which is that can be transformed, not that which you wish to be.

The comic spirit is given to us in order that we may analyze, weigh, and clarify things in us which nettle us, or which we are outgrowing, or trying to reshape

But which was the real me? Let me be perfectly honest: I was a man of many faces. (p.33)

A man should be resigned to knowing himself a little better each day if he hasn't got the guts to put an end to his sniveling once and for all.

I nod, because I do understand. I'm just not sure how to go about divorcing myself from the evil I've already accepted.

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. They will practice Indian yoga and all its exercises, observe a strict regimen of diet, learn the literature of the whole world - all because they cannot get on with themselves and have not the slightest faith that anything useful could ever come out of their own souls.

To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.