John Darnielle Quotes

I've been very fortunate, because I've been involved in things that very often lead to obscurity. I was in some pictures that were not successful whatsoever. I think people admire persistence. People notice that I'm still there.

I came to Hollywood determined to follow in Jean Harlow's footsteps, but I was determined not to die young. My hope was to endure. And endure I have.

Obviously, as you get a little older, you are not going to be quite as quick or quite as strong, and so I might be regarded by some as the underdog... There is actually a statue of Big Ben and I in Perth, Ont., and I was on a Canadian stamp once, and normally you have to be dead to do either of those things, and, well, here I am, still going.

How many times can a man go down and still be alive?

She sits down and puts her hand to her chest and rocks. Thinks of all she has lost and will lose. All she has had and will have. It seems to her that life is like gathering berries into an apron with a hole. Why do we keep on? Because the berries are beautiful, and we must eat to survive. We catch what we can. We walk past what we lose for the promise of more, just ahead.

I love what's left after love has been tested.

I think when I stop fighting, I die in a sense.

I am a great artist and I know it, it is because I am that I have been able to endure so much suffering.

There is an art in taking the whiplash of suffering full in the face, an art you must learn. Let each single attack exhaust itself; pain always makes single attacks, so that its bite may be more intense, more concentrated. And you, while its fangs are implanted and injecting their venom at one spot, do not forget to offer it another place where it can bite you, and so relieve the pain of the first.

It is not quite the same when we are seventy-two as when we are twenty-seven; still I am glad of what is left, and wish we might both hold out till the victory we have sought is won, but all the same the victory is coming. In the aftertime the world will be the better for it.

I don't know... there's something kind of beautiful about it, don't you think? That we keep living and growing even though our world is a corpse? That we keep coming back no matter how many of us die?

l am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground. So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind: Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

You tell me: 'Life is hard to bear.' But if it were otherwise why should ou have your pride in the morning nad your resignation in the evening?

I have lived a life full of love and pain, of Joy and Sorrow, and I live on still. i have many, many years ahead of me, each day with the potential to be filled to the brim with trials to face and challenges to overcome.

I'm not saying that everything is survivable. Just that everything except the last thing is.

Listen to me: die after me, all right? I don't care what else you do, where you go, how you screw up your life, just... survive. Outlive me, please.

My heart is too thoroughly dried to be broken in a hurry, and I mean to live as long as I can.

Winning means outlasting everyone else.

Work hard, think fast and you'll last.

If you keep working you'll last longer. I'd hate to spend the rest of my life trying to outwit an 18-inch fish.

But grace can be the experience of a second wind, when even though what you want is clarity and resolution, what you get is stamina and poignancy and the strength to hang on.

If she lives till doomsday, she'll burn a week longer than the whole world.

At some point, my body will collapse. But I hope that my brain will still be working so that I can carry on with writing.

People say, "Well, we're all just going to die and go to heaven anyway, or Jesus is going to come back" or something. I don't feel like God wants us just to lay down and die just because that's going to happen. I think we should keep trying.