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It's an important moment as a reader, I think, when you can forget the question of whether you need to know what happened. Some people really want hard explanations. I'm the other way. I like mysteries. I don't want to frustrate people. I don't want people to feel like they got no answers, but I want to approach the mystery and sit with it.

John Darnielle

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John Darnielle
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: March 16
Composer
Musician
Singer-Songwriter
Bloomington
Indiana
Thinking
Hard
Question
Like
Feel
Answers
Frustrate
People
Feels
Happened
Explanations
Important
Forget
Mysteries
Needs
Whether
Explanation
Really
Moment
Mystery
Way
Moments
Reader
Think
Need
Approach

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I get nostalgic about having lived in Ames, Iowa, even though being a vegetarian in Iowa is not fun.
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Not everybody relates to pain, but if you can watch other people playacting it, you can absorb some of that vibe. It's like watching horror movies - you want to have the experience, but in a safe environment.
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Back in the 90s, if you did mail order in music, you could make a good living doing it if you could hustle.
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I usually kind of can't wait until my records leak. Back in the day, you could give people tapes, but you can't do that anymore, because it would be available to everyone on the planet within an hour.
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Conservative forces in the South have a lot of power - almost dynastic - dating back many years.
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Take dance music: I like enough of it and its history to be able to say a word or two about this or that record, but I'm nobody's authority.
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Life is hard, you're tired, and there's disease. The strategy that works for children is to be delighted by the things that delight you.
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You learn to present dark things without including their ability to harm, treasuring them for what they are.
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I couldn't name more than a couple of good drum'n'bass acts, and I have no idea what's big in the dance world right now.
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There's this idea that there was a point in our childhood when we were in some way better than we are now and we should try to hang on to that.
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Everybody is in various states of needing to transcend something. I believe in mental health care, but when we call people crazy, we exclude them from our circle.
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I don't celebrate milestones and I don't do anniversary editions. It's not my style to reflect on accomplishments.
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One way you can get really close to God is to sin as hard as you can.
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Do every stupid thing that makes you feel alive.
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When all my friends insisted that they were feeling jaded, it struck me as an affected pose. To me, everything is always new.
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It's good to be young, but let's not kid ourselves/ It's better to pass on through those years and come out the other side/ With our hearts still beating/ Having stared down demons/ Come back breathing.
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It's hard to stay positive when there's a lot of evil in the world.
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There is something fierce and starved about first ideas.
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If you're standing in the middle of a ring and you're playing the villain, and everyone is booing and throwing things at you, that's real.
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Kayfabe is kind of a code. To break kayfabe is to let people know that the punch was not real and that the match was scripted.
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