Mark Z. Danielewski

Then no matter where you are, in a crowded restaurant or on some desolate street or even in the comforts of your own home, you'll watch yourself dismantle every assurance you ever lived by. You'll stand aside as a great complexity intrudes, tearing apart, piece by piece, all your carefully conceived denials, whether deliberate or unconscious. And for better or worse you'll turn, unable to resist, though try to resist you still will, fighting with everything you've got not to face the thing you most dread, what is now, what will be, what has always come before, the creature you truly are, the creature we all are, buried in the nameless black of a name.And then the nightmares will begin.

In the end Navidson is left with one page and one match. For a long time he waits in darkness and cold, postponing this final bit of illumination. At last though, he grips the match by the neck and after locating the friction strip sparks to life a final ball of light.First, he reads a few lines by match light and then as the heat bites his fingertips he applies the flame to the page. Here then is one end: a final act of reading, a final act of consumption. And as the fire rapidly devours the paper, Navidson's eyes frantically sweep down over the text, keeping just ahead of the necessary immolation, until as he reaches the last few words, flames lick around his hands, ash peels off into the surrounding emptiness, and then as the fire retreats, dimming, its light suddenly spent, the book is gone leaving nothing behind but invisible traces already dismantled in the dark.

Prometheus, thief of light, giver of light, bound by the gods, must have been a book.

Anger is one way to respond to fear. I say one way because responses are categorically multiple.

Make no mistake, those who write long books have nothing to say.Of course those who write short books have even less to say.

What is boredom? Endless repetitions, like, for example, Navidson__ corridors and rooms, which are consistently devoid of any Myst-like discoveries thus causing us to lose interest. What then makes anything exciting? Or better yet: what is exciting? While the degree varies, we are always excited by anything that engages us, influences us or more simply involves us. In those endlessly repetitive hallways and stairs, there is nothing for us to connect with. That permanently foreign place does not excite us. It bores us. And that is that, except for the fact that there is no such thing as boredom. Boredom is really a psychic defense protecting us from ourselves, from complete paralysis, by repressing, among other things, the meaning of that place, which in this case is and always has been horror.

Sublime is something you choke on after a shot of tequila.

I want something else. I__ not even sure what to call it anymore except I know it feels roomy and it__ drenched in sunlight and it__ weightless and I know it__ not cheap. It__ probably not even real.

Physics depends on a universe infinitely centred on an equals sign.

Quick note here: if this crush-slash-swooning stuff is hard for you to stomach; if you__e never had a similar experience, then you should come to grips with the fact that you__e got a TV dinner for a heart and might want to consider climbing inside a microwave and turning it on high for at least an hour, which if you do consider only goes to show what kind of idiot you truly are because microwaves are way too small for anyone, let alone you, to climb into.

Death, it turns out, is the mother of all conflicts.

Irony? Irony can never be more than our own personal Maginot line; the drawing of it, for the most part, purely arbitrary.

...and there you have it, another body on the floor surrounded by things that don't mean much to anyone except to the one who can't take any of them along.

I went outside. Tried taking in the billions of stars above, lingering long enough to allow each point of light the chance to scratch a deep hole in the back of my retina, so that when I finally did turn to face the dark surrounding forest I thought I saw the billion eyes of a billion cats blinking out, in the math of the living, the sum of the universe, the stories of history , a life older than anyone could have ever imagined. And even after they were gone--fading away together, as if they really were one--something still lingered in those sweet folds of black pine , sitting quietly, almost as if it too were waiting for something to wake.

Her smile, I'm sure, burnt Rome to the ground.

The greatest of love letters are always coded for the one and not the many.

Maturity, one discovers, has everything to do with the acceptance of __ot knowing.

Love of love written by the broken hearted, love of life written by the dead.