Daniel Wallace Quotes

“People were so cheap there... they ate beans to save on bubble bath.”

“I wanted to be a great man.”

“ ‘We all have stories, just as you do. Ways in which he touched us, helped us, gave us money, sold it to us wholesale. Lots of stories, big and small. They all add up. Over a lifetime it all adds up. That’s why we’re here, William. We’re a a part of him, who he is, just as he is a part of us. You still don’t understand, do you?’ I didn’t. But as I stared at the man and he stared back at me, in my father’s dream I remembered where we’d met before. ‘And what did my father do for you?’ I asked him, and the old man smiled. ‘He made me laugh,’ he said.”

“In the land of the dying, sentences go unfinished, you know how they’re going to end.”

“My hope is that in these last moments he’ll show me the vulnerable and tender underbelly of his self, but this isn’t happening, yet, and I’m a fool to think that it will. This is the way it has gone from the beginning: every time we get close to something meaningful, serious, or delicate, he tells a joke. There is a never a yes or no, what do you think, here, according to me, is the meaning of life.”

″...at that moment he turned into a weird creature, wild, concurrently young and old, dying and newborn. My father became a myth.”

“Truth is, I’ve been thirsty my whole life. Never really known why”.

“He was a big fish, even then.”

“The ending is always a surprise.”

“He believed the stars were wishes, and that one day they would all come true.”

“How can the world be seen at such speeds? Where do people need to go so badly they can’t realize what is already here, outside the car window?”

“Okay okay- the thing about icebergs is you only see 10 percent. The other 90 percent is below the water where you can’t see it. That’s what it is with you Dad. I’m only seeing this little bit that sticks above the water.”

“Oh, come on. I can’t go back, I’m a human sacrifice. If I go back they’ll think I’m a coward. I’d rather be dinner than a coward.”

“When a man’s stories are remembered, then he is immortal.”

“What is it you say now, what peace is there to be made in the last minutes of the last day that will mark the before and after of your life until then, the day that will change everything for both of you, the living and the dead?”

“It was that nigh that I discovered that most things that you consider evil or wicked are simply lonely, and lacking in the social niceties.”

“This is what is meant by last words: they are keys to unlock the afterlife. They’re not last words but passwords, and as soon as they’re spoken you can go.”

“I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. He’s lived his whole life like a turtle, within an emotional carapace that makes for the perfect defense: there’s absolutely no way in.”

“In telling the story of my father’s life, it’s impossible to separate the fact from the fiction, the man from the myth. The best I can do is to tell it the way he told me. It doesn’t always make sense, and most of it never happened. But that’s what kind of story this is.”

“Dreams are what keep a man going.”