Mark Z. Danielewski Quotes

My unhappiness protects me from life.

As a kid, I would push my shoulders forward in order to hide my heart from being hurt.

I choose to live without hope to protect myself from disappointment. It's very effective!

Sadness is also a kind of defence.

Sometimes the funnier you are, the more vulnerable and scared you are underneath it all. So I think, for me, comedy was always a defense. It was a weapon so that you can't hurt me.

When we have built up armor against all the bad things we think might happen in the world, we have a false sense of protection and have only built up isolation.

I did have an emo phase. It was sort of like armor for me.

But I want to tell my stories, more than that, I have to in order to stay sane.

The best way to not get your heart broken, is pretending you don't have one.

I have created a shell around me, in the good and the bad moments.

Depending on where my self-confidence was, growing up, I would use humor either to bring people closer, or to keep them away from certain feelings I had.

I conditioned myself many years ago that nobody could hurt me.

If someone has gone through a lot of emotional pain, including the loss of loved ones, that person may try to build a shell around his or her feelings to protect him- or herself from the pain.

Maybe by nature and because of my past I protect myself. The minute I feel any tension I take myself away.

We can’t always tell the whole story about ourselves.

Humor is a way of holding off how awful life can be, to protect yourself.

Blaming is a way to protect your heart, trying to protect what is soft and open and tender in yourself.

Good stories are constructed, not found.

I'll see something awful on the street and I'll come home and say to my boyfriend, "I just saw the funniest thing on the street." It's a stance. It's the way I was born, or the way I was damaged.

Arrogance is an utterly appropriate weapon to use against a hostile world, a world in which arrogance is feared and respected, even if, like mine, it's only feigned.

I think that people create the world that they live in. Your existence is very subjective, and you tell stories and organize the world outside of you into these stories to help you understand it.

We build our character as a carapace to keep away the fear of the abyss. That's what our character is for.

We have to have a version of our own story that we keep telling ourselves that allows us to get up in the morning. This version of yourself is what you sell to yourself. I think it necessarily includes ... not looking at certain things. Everybody's got some blind spot.

I think that everything in this life is a story you know; our own narrative, our own history, it's all a story.

we become the stories we tell ourselves