3:34 PM"The impossible is one thing when considered as a purely intellectual conceit. After all, it is not so large a problem when one can puzzle over an Escher print and then close the book. It is quite another thing when one faces a physical reality the mind and body cannot accept."
— Mark Z. Danielewski (House of Leaves)
3:30 PM"To get a better idea try this: focus on these words, and whatever you do don’t let your eyes wander past the perimeter of this page. Now imagine just beyond your peripheral vision, maybe behind you, maybe to the side of you, maybe even in front of you, but right where you can’t see it, something is quietly closing in on you, so quiet in fact you can only hear it as silence. Find those pockets without sound. That’s where it is. Right at this moment. But don’t look. …
Don’t look.
I didn’t.
Of course I looked."
— Mark Z. Danielewski (House of Leaves)
2:11 PM"Now I’m sure you’re wondering something. Is it just coincidence that this cold water predicament of mine also appears in this chapter?
Not at all. Zampano only wrote ‘heater.’ The word ‘water’ back there - I added that.
Now there’s an admission, eh?
Hey, not fair, you cry.
Hey, hey, fuck you, I say."
— Mark Z. Danielewski (House of Leaves)
1:48 PM"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 of your carefully conceived denials, whether deliberate or unconscious. And then 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."
— Mark Z. Danielewski (House of Leaves)
1:30 PM"You might try, then, as I did, to find a sky so full of stars it will blind you again. Only no sky can blind you now. Even with all that iridescent magic up there, your eye will no longer linger on the light, it will no longer trace constellations. You’ll care only about the darkness and you’ll watch it for hours, for days, maybe even for years, trying in vain to believe you’re some kind of indispensable, universe-appointed sentinel, as if just by looking you could actually keep it all at bay. It will get so bad you’ll be afraid to look away, you’ll be afraid to sleep."
— Mark Z. Danielewski (House of Leaves)
1:21 PM"But his humor was that wry, desiccated kind soldiers whisper, all their jokes subsurface, their laughter amounting to little more than a tic in the corner of the mouth, told as they wait together in their outpost, slowly realizing that help’s not going to reach them in time and come nightfall, no matter what they’ve done or what they try to say, slaughter will overrun them all. Carrion dawn for vultures."
— Mark Z. Danielewski (House of Leaves)
1:18 PM"Wonder and the way the unimaginable is sometimes suggested by the inanimate suddenly faded. The thing became only a thing."
— Mark Z. Danielewski (House of Leaves)
1:17 PM"One thing’s for sure, even without touching it, both of us slowly began to feel its heaviness, sensed something horrifying in its proportions, its silence, its stillness, even if it did seem to have been shoved almost carelessly to the side of the room. I think now if someone had said be careful, we would have. I know a moment came when I felt certain its resolute blackness was capable of anything, maybe even of slashing out, tearing up the floor, murdering Zampano, murdering us, maybe even murdering you. And then the moment passed."
— Mark Z. Danielewski (House of Leaves)
1:14 PM"As I discovered, there were reams and reams of it. Endless snarls of words, sometimes twisting into meaning, sometimes into nothing at all, frequently breaking apart, always branching off into other pieces I’d come across later - on old napkins, the tattered edges of an envelope, once even on the back of a postage stamp; everything and anything but empty; each fragment completely covered with the creep of years and years of ink pronouncements; layered, crossed out, amended; handwritten, typed; legible, illegible; impenetrable, lucid; torn, stained, scotch taped; some bits crisp and clean, others faded, burnt or folded and refolded so many times the creases have obliterated whole passages of god knows what - sense? truth? deceit? a legacy of prophecy or lunacy or nothing of the kind?, and in the end achieving, designating, describing, recreating - find your own words; I have no more; or plenty more but why? and all to tell - what?"
— Mark Z. Danielewski (House of Leaves)
1:08 PM"I’d been in the throes of looking for an apartment after a little difficulty with a landlord who woke up one morning convinced he was Charles de Gaulle. I was so stunned by this announcement that before I could think twice I’d already told him how in my humble estimation he did not at all resemble an airport though the thought of a 757 landing on him was not at all disagreeable. I was promptly evicted."
