Dan Chaon Quotes

A conscience is a troublesome thing at times. I woke up at 4 o'clock this morning and I spent the time feeling what a nothing I was, and wishing I was so very different. Then the morning's post brought me a letter from a friend, saying I was so this, so that - it made me really cry, I was so grateful.

I have a lot of growing up to do. But I think, 'Hell, is it too late?'

Oh my god what am I doing with my life?

Sure, I’m dramatic and sloppily semi-cynical and semi-sentimental. But, in leisure years I could grow and choose my way. Now I am living on the edge. We all are on the brink, and it takes a lot of nerve, a lot of energy, to teeter on the edge, looking over, looking down into the windy blackness and not being quite able to make out, through the yellow, stinking mist, just what lies below in the slime, in the oozing, vomit-streaked slime; and so I could go on, my thoughts, writing much, trying to find the core, the meaning for myself.

I was just struggling with my inner vachette and pondering the depths of my own inhumanity.

Sometimes I lie awake at night, and ask, 'Where have I gone wrong?' Then a voice says to me, 'This is going to take more than one night.'

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

I found after seventy years that I was not a lunatic but a moron.... I should have been able to do better.

Even now, as I write this, I can still feel that tightness. And I want you to feel it--the wind coming off the river, the waves, the silence, the wooded frontier. You're at the bow of a boat on the Rainy River. You're twenty-one years old, you're scared, and there's a hard squeezing pressure in your chest. What would you do? Would you jump? Would you feel pity for yourself? Would you think about your family and your childhood and your dreams and all you're leaving behind? Would it hurt? Would it feel like dying? Would you cry, as I did?

And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to move out of it.

If a man's at odds to know his own mind it's because he hasn't got aught but his mind to know it with.

Anxieties about ourselves endure. If our proper study is indeed the study of humankind, then it has seemed-and still seems-to many that the study is dangerous. Perhaps we shall find out that we were not what we took ourselves to be. But if the historical development of science has indeed sometimes pricked our vanity, it has not plunged us into an abyss of immorality. Arguably, it has liberated us from misconceptions, and thereby aided us in our moral progress.

Until a man can quit talking loudly to himself in order to shout down the memories of blunderings and gropings, he is in no shape for the painstaking examination of distress.

Later on, when I tried to imagine how I might have ruined things, that would occur to me - that I'd so rarely resisted, that I hadn't made it hard enough for him. Maybe it was like gathering your strength and hurling your body against a door you believe to be locked, and then the door opens easily - it wasn't locked at all - and you're standing looking into the room, trying to remember what it was you thought you wanted.

Now they came back to him, on this night he was seventeen years old. All the years and places of his brief broken life came within mind's reach and made a whole again. He knew once more, at last, after this long, bitter, waisted time, who he was and where he was. But where he must go in the years to come, that he could not see; and he feared to see it.

And I walk out of space Into an overgrown garden of values, And tear up seeming stability And self-comprehension of causes. And your, infinity, textbook I read by myself, without people - Leafless, savage medical book, A problem book of gigantic radicals.

I am pretty sick with myself! It seemed a pretty good idea at the time. Around the time I turned 30, I started to feel very creative, more creative than I had been before which is good and I like that.

And I wonder: Have I squandered my dogness? Have I forsaken my nature for my desires? Have I made a mistake by anticipating my future and shunning my present?

I embarked on my life - I didn't do anything. I don't have an explanation.

I've always been strong-minded, but I wonder.

I am really puzzled to understand myself.

Anybody can get lost in themselves.

When I read profiles of myself, I sometimes think: 'I have spent my whole life struggling to understand my motivations and impulses, and I've never quite sorted them out.'

If we fear the unknown then surely we fear ourselves.