Mark Z. Danielewski Quotes

If every life is a river, then it's little wonder that we do not even notice the changes that occur until we are far out in the darkest sea. One day you look around and nothing is familiar, not even your own face. My name once meant daughter, grandaughter, friend, sister, beloved. Now those words mean only what their letters spell out; Star in the night sky. Truth in the darkness. I have crossed over to a place where I never thought I'd be. I am someone I would have never imagined. A secret. A dream. I am this, body and soul. Burn me. Drown me. Tell me lies. I will still be who I am.

You have to lose yourself to find yourself.

I don't even recognize myself sometimes.

I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then

I am learning to see. I don't know why it is, but everything enters me more deeply and doesn't stop where it once used to. I have an interior that I never knew of... What's the use of telling someone that I am changing? If I'm changing, I am no longer who I was; and if I am something else, it's obvious that I have no acquaintances. And I can't possibly write to strangers.

I had hit a critical period in my life, where I changed very much as a person. I consider the person I used to be, dead, and I'm glad that he is. Insecure, frightened, confused, much like a lot of people I know today.

Maybe she couldn't know who she was today. Maybe it was enough to know that she was no longer who she was before.

I wondered how much of me would be left after tomorrow.

and because what we learn in the dark remains all our lives, a noise like the sea, displacing the day's pale knowledge, you'll come to yourself in a glimmer of rainfall or frost, the burnt smell of autumn, a meeting of parallel lines, and know you were someone else for the longest time, pretending you knew where you were, like a diffident tourist, lost on the one main square, and afraid to enquire.

And in that moment, everything I knew to be true about myself up until then was gone. I was acting like another woman, yet I was more myself than ever before.

My 20s were a time where I made it; my 30s were when I was away, confused, and trying to figure it all out.

To become different from what we are, we must have some awareness of what we are.

To live is to feel oneself lost.

There are a lot of coming out videos of people who are gay or lesbian, and they're so confident. But it made me cry because I'm not that. I don't know who I am 100 percent.

Most of my world is in London, and I feel like this is where I went mad and ended up finding myself.

I'm not even sure who I really am sometimes.

This was not the old Chichikov. This was some wreckage of the old Chichikov. The inner state of his soul might be compared to a demolished building, which has been demolished so that from it a new one could be built; but the new one has not been started yet, because the infinitive plan has not yet come from the architect and the workers are left in perplexity.

First I was 'angry,' then 'spiritual.' Now I don't know what I am.

I don't recognize myself. I don't know who I am anymore." And it's all fun and games until someone loses an I.

When I had nothing to lose, I had everything. When I stopped being who I am, I found myself.

The change which the writing wrought in me (and of which I did not write) was only a beginning; only to prepare me for the gods' surgery. They used my own pen to probe my wound.

Knowing who you are is good for one generation only. You haven't the foggiest idea where you stand now or who you are

I'm an amalgamation of what I've needed to be. Part scholar, part rebel, part nobleman, part Mistborn, and part soldier. Sometimes I don't even know myself. I had a devil of a time getting all those pieces to work together. And, just when I'm starting to get it figured out, the world up and ends on me.

The solution begins with a deeper transformation that must occur in each of us. I AM isn’t as much about what you can do, as who you can be. And from that transformation of being, action will naturally follow.