7 Quotes by J. Robert Lennon

My sister stood up, trembling, and I must admit that I expected her familiar sneer to have taken its usual place on her face. But all I could find there was unhappiness and fear. Fear of my reaction, perhaps. But when a person has lived a life like hers, a life of promiscuity, rootlessness, and substance abuse, resentment and fear tend to replace all reasonable and proper emotions, and the world becomes your enemy.

All the stories we tell ourselves are wrong.

It is so much like a movie, Irina can't stand it.

People, in my long experience, want to talk. They may believe they wish to keep secrets, and they may believe that they are capable of doing so. But the truth is that secrets exist to be revealed; and it is usually very easy to find the combination of words that will cause them to emerge.

At least things fucking happen in those books, she thought: it's not just people lying in bed and thinking about their fucking feelings.

Wolf in White Van is beautiful, enigmatic, and sad, and like every other brilliant thing John Darnielle has ever done, it seems to come from some fully imagined universe, of which we only get to see this haunting, enticing sliver. I utterly love it.

Treasure nothing, be willing to throw out anything. The story you just wrote that you are proud of should not be coddled and worshipped. You can do it again. If your house burned down with all your work inside it, you would still be the writer you are, and you would continue to be worth something.