John Darnielle Quotes

I have all that I lost and I go carrying my childhood like a favorite flower that perfumes my hand.

Maybe I'm sort of like the players - there's still a lot of little boy in me.

I am a kid in the dressing-up box at heart.

I wish I had had my books when I was a kid, I do.

I think that all of us either lose touch with the child inside us or try and hold onto it because it so precious to us and it's such an extraordinary part of our lives.

I think that we are all much closer to our childhood selves than we often think, so when we read about childhood, it can surprise us how immediate or moving it is, when perhaps those feelings are just there, waiting to be accessed all the time.

I haven't had a chance to decorate my dressing room yet, but I have these pictures of myself as a kid that I want to put up because I said, 'I really want to make sure that I take that kid with me on this journey.' I want him to experience this.

My ideal goal is to "mature" into childhood. That would be genuine maturity.

You bury your childhood here and there. It waits for you, all your life, to come back and dig it up.

Being with a kid always takes you to being a kid somehow, and they really are showing me a childhood I might not have had in some way.

In childhood we all have ... a far higher sensibility for April and April evenings - a heartache for them, which in riper years is gradually and irretrievably consoled.

What is it about childhood that never lets you go, even when you're so wrecked it's hard to believe you ever were a child?

I look in the mirror through the eyes of the child that was me.

I wasn't ever unable to function, but I did realize at some point that I had built a wall between myself and my childhood by saying, "I'm so glad that's over. Nothing can ever be as bad again," without understanding that my childhood was still very much with me.

The rediscovered path, where were left the traces of childhood's lost steps.

Childhood candor... shall I ever find you again?

The child is in me still and sometimes not so still.

How much to learn if we could spend one hour, spend twenty minutes, with the us we will become! How much could we say to the us we were.

Childhood feels so permanent, like it's the entire world, and then one day it's over and you're shoveling wet dirt onto your father's coffin, stunned at the impermanence of everything.

When the dawn light is coursing through the slats in the shutters at last, making thin stripes on the floor, she, tossing, decides that for every human soul there must surely be a possible childhood worth living, but once it slips by, there isn’t any reclaiming it or revising it.

We seem but to linger in manhood to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they vanish out of memory ere we learn the language.

When I'm doing something, it's something that I had a perspective on in my childhood, or now, but it may be different. I always can go back to what I love, but if somebody has a better idea, then I'm all for it.

Proust, more perspicaciously than any other writer, reminds us that the 'walks' of childhood form the raw material of our intelligence.

I'd give all the wealth that years have piled, the slow result of life's decay, To be once more a little child for one bright summer day.

That is how you know you've left childhood behind-when you wish for time to go backward.