Mark Kurlansky Quotes

I've had the longest mid-life crisis ever.

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

Right after 'Raymond' I had a world-is-my-oyster attitude, but I found out I don't like oysters. I had this existential emptiness. 'What is my purpose? Who am I?' I had a big identity crisis.

Who in the world am I? Ah, that's the great puzzle.

There was something so immensely redemptive and exciting for me to imagine that my unknown father was not just a man who had abandoned me but a noble man of adventure who had no choice.

Your birth is a mistake you'll spend your whole life trying to correct.

What are you? What am I? Those are the questions that constantly persecute and torment me and perhaps also play some part in my art.

Everybody has a story... and a scream.

I can't wish I weren't something that I am.

I did have a midlife crisis.

There was a time where I was really confused about who I was and what I was doing, and I was just kind of depressed.

I wanna go watch a story and a fight between a good guy and a bad guy.

I think everybody can identify, you know, with this sort of struggle to decide for yourself who you are, you know, and what your place in life is.

It's a lot harder to write a story that's compelling about identity and sense of self without some villain in the room.

Man has always been his own most vexing problem.

Fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step.

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

I've never been in another kind of midlife crisis. I don't know what it feels like when you're through that, but I definitely feel that changing a few things, like being on a different label and having things kind of settle back into a sense of normality, helps to feel grounded.

It is in the turmoil of chaos that we discover what, if anything, we are.

The big change that's happened for me in terms of my own life and how outsidership is reflected in my work is that I used to feel extraordinarily isolated in my life as I was trying to figure out who I was and how to have intimate relationships. And so my central characters also were isolated and usually in quite a bit of pain.

Soul, what have I to do with you?

Whether a man lives or dies in vain can be measured only by the way he faces his own problems, by the success or failure of the inner conflict within his own soul. And of this no one may know save God.

I want to escape from myself. For when I do start up and stare myself seedily in the face, as happens to be my case at present, my blankness is inconceivable--indescribable--my misery amazing.

No matter where you go, you always see yourself in the rearview mirror.