Welcome To Night Vale Quotes

Fear is a reasonable response to life.

She understood the world and her place in it. She understood nothing. The world and her place in it were nothing and she understood that.

Remember that misuse of language can lead to miscommunication, and that miscommunication leads to everything that has ever happened in the whole of the world.

People are beautiful when they do beautiful things.

Comfort was the answer to all life's problems. It didn't solve them, but it made them more distant for a bit as they quietly worsened.

It was a fair question, although the problem with fair questions is that they are asked about an unfair world.

The past is gone, and cannot harm you anymore. And while the future is fast coming for you, it always flinches first and settles in as the gentle present.

She was angry, which is the more productive cousin of fear.

Are we living a life that is safe from harm? Of course not. We never are. But that’s not the right question. The question is are we living a life that is worth the harm?

She left the shower as most people leave showers, clean and a little lonely.

The search for truth takes us to dangerous places,” said Old Woman Josie. “Often it takes us to that most dangerous place: the library. You know who said that? No? George Washington did. Minutes before librarians ate him.

Sleep is confusing. Dreams are baffling. The concept of transitioning from one perceived reality to another is a tolerated madness.

People who grow older think they are so wise, she thought. Like time means anything at all.

In other news, a recent report suggests that things may not be as they seem.

There is nothing more lonely than an action taken quietly on your own, and nothing more comforting than doing that same quiet action in parallel with fellow humans doing the same action, everyone alone next to each other.

Librarians are hideous creatures of unimaginable power. And even if you could imagine their power, it would be illegal. It is absolutely illegal to even try to picture what such a being would be like.

She was not shy, but maybe lazy socially. Not willing to seek out situations and connections that were not already part of her routine.

Almost always we are all experiencing the same problems as everyone else,” said Josie, “and pretending we don’t so that every one of us thinks we are alone.

In terms of tacos, she was doing fine.

You say your life is unraveling. Your life cannot unravel. Your life is your life. You haven't lost it. It's just different now

Sometimes it is easy to forget which things in the world can feel pain and which cannot.

We understand the lights. We understand the lights above the Arby’s. We understand so much. But the sky behind those lights, mostly void, partially stars, that sky reminds us: We don’t understand even more.

Sleep heavily and know that I am here with you now. The past is gone, and cannot harm you anymore. And while the future is fast coming for you, it always flinches first and settles in as the gentle present. This now, this us? We can cope with that. We can do this together. You and I, drowsily, but comfortably.

Death is only the end if you assume the story is about you.

there’s no sense in going through life presuming awful things about people you do not know.

To be remembered is, I think, a basic human right. Not one that occurs to a person when it is there, but like a parched throat in a desert when it is gone.

Desperation does not breed empathy or clear thinking.

It's not other people that hurt us, but what we feel about them

We are skipping Friday this week, but we’ll make up for it by having Double Friday next week. Mark your schedules.

The present tense of regret is indecision.

But babies become children, and they go to elementary schools that indoctrinate them on how to overthrow governments, and they get interested in boys and girls, or they don't, and anyway they change.

She didn’t have a good reason for most of what she did. Mostly, she went by what seemed right in the moment, and justified it to herself later, and in this way she was no different than anyone else she knew.

It was a simpler time. Because I personally had less memories and so less to superimpose upon the world, and so it was much clearer, and also I was younger. Thus, the world was simpler.

Remember: if you see something, say nothing, and drink to forget.

Sometimes it's okay to find something beautiful without correctly understanding it.

I don’t know who I am and I don’t understand the progression of time as it relates to me,” said Jackie. Leann nodded. “We’ve all been there.

We live in a pattern that we'll never detect, and that will shuffle us through invisible hierarchies to the actual death of us.

There's a monster at the end of this book. It's the blank page where the story ends and you're left alone with yourself and your thoughts.

Whisper a dangerous secret to someone you care about. Now they have the power to destroy you, but they won't. This is what love is.

I’m not afraid,” she declared, and she wasn’t. She was angry, which is the more productive cousin of fear.

Her body no longer felt young. All of her energy had been robbed from her. She felt old, looked young, was neither.

Clocks and calendars don’t work in Night Vale. Time itself doesn’t work.

Are we living a life that is safe from harm? Of course not. We never are. But that’s not the right question. The question is: Are we living a life that is worth the harm?

Some people prefer to make their homes so neat that there is no evidence of life anywhere at all.

Troy and I loved each other. We called it 'unconditional love', which was true. Once conditions arose, the love dissipated.

You, of course, should always chant when you wash your hands. It is only hygienic.

I'm sorry that it was this way, Mom. Not sorry like an apology. I'm sorry as in sorrow.

And now a brief public service announcement. Alligators: can they kill your children? Yes.

One day we will destroy the moon with indifference!

If we cannot be judged on our actions, then we cannot be judged.

Sometimes you go through things that seem huge at the time, like a mysterious glowing cloud devouring your entire community. While they're happening, they feel like the only thing that matters and you can hardly imagine that there's a world out there that might have anything else going on. And then the glow cloud moves on. And you move on. And the event is behind you. And you may find, as time passes, that you remember it less and less. Or absolutely not at all, in my case.

Science was meant to be hard. After all, what was science but a bunch of bored human beings trying to challenge themselves when faith became too easy

You believe in mountains, right? Not everyone does.

Pepsi: Drink Coke.

Of course, angels do not exist. It is illegal to consider their existence, or even to give them a dollar when they forget bus money and start hovering around the Ralphs asking for change.

Silence is golden. Words are vibrations. Thoughts are magic.

Some days the weather happens and we never look up or go outside and that’s okay too.

It’s nice to have a station pet. Wish it wasn’t trapped in a hovering prison in the men’s bathroom, but listen: no pet is perfect. It becomes perfect when you learn to accept it for what it is.

but what are people but deaths that haven’t happened yet?

Everything I do is for a reason. And I don't know what that reason is. Everything I do is for a reason, and I know none of them. Everything makes sense, and the sense is hidden from me.

You're a good one, Jackie Fierro," they said. "And that makes the world a dangerous place for you.

Like any reasonable human, I do not like harming innocent people, but like any reasonable human, I do not consider the wealthy to be innocent people.

It would be safe to assume that the house is an enclosed structure owned and built by people. It would be weird to assume that the house has a personality, a soul. Why would anyone assume that? It is true. It does. But that was weird to assume that. Never assume that kind of thing.

He was not so arrogant as to refer to his own death as The End, just one of billions of ends before The End. Death is only the end if you assume the story is about you.

It is a terrible, terrible beauty that I do not understand.

This is Night Vale. Our mayor once led an army of masked warriors from another dimension through magic doors to defeat an army of smiling blood-covered office workers. There is definitely, definitely another way.

The desert seems vast, even endless. And yet scientists tell us that somewhere, even now, there is snow.

Most people in Night Vale get by with a cobbled-together framework of lies and assumptions and conspiracy theories.

Not everybody gets to be friends with everybody.

She loved him the way one loves an old bridge or a wool sweater or the sound of a growing tulip.

Imagine a fifteen-year-old boy. Nope. That was not right at all. Try again.

The moon’s weird though, right? It’s there, and there, and then suddenly it’s not. And it seems to be pretty far up. Is it watching us? If not, what is it watching instead? Is there something more interesting than us? Hey, watch us moon! We may not always be the best show in the universe, but we try.

Perfection is not real. Perfection is not human. Carlos is not perfect- no, even better- he is imperfect. Everything about him, and us, and all of this is imperfect. And those imperfections in our reality are the seams and cracks into which our outsized love can seep and pool.

All the beauty in the world was made within the oppressive limitations of time and death and impermanence.

The tarantula stared at the ceiling not knowing at all what a ceiling is.

There are a lot of things we don’t understand about orange juice, the house thought.

Parents sometimes show love through velocity.

We are not history yet. We are happening now. How miraculous is that?

Diane was gasping and slowing, cursing years of intended workouts that had never happened.

When nothing else works, eating sure does.

Everyone in this town is frightening and friendly and kind and awful. But everyone everywhere is.

Wednesday is Smell Like a Pirate Day. Everyone in town is encouraged to get in on the wacky fun by not bathing for weeks and rubbing yourself with ash and blood.

Finally, most identity thefts occur when databases are not securely managed. So, my advice? Don’t ever end up in a database.

Then you will die, but only for a little while.

Don’t worry. Don’t worry. All is as it was meant to be. It was meant to be lonely and terrifying and unfair and fleeting. Don’t worry.

Mostly we don’t get destroyed,” John said. “Mostly we destroy ourselves.” Another

At your smallest components, you are indistinguishable from a forest fire.

Get out to Lenny’s for their big grand opening sale. Find eight government secrets and get a free kidnapping and personality reassignment so that you’ll forget you found them!

As the old saying went: “Not all windowless vans have residential surveillance equipment.

But here is the truth of nostalgia: We don’t feel it for who we were, but who we weren’t. We feel it for all the possibilities that were open to us but that we didn’t take.

The reading area was a beautifully crafted trap set by the librarians, but it was too perfect. Even the dumbest book lover—and anyone who would regularly choose to come in contact with books could not be a bright bulb, Jackie thought—wouldn’t fall for this.

The City Council ended the conference by devouring a raw potato in quick, small bites of their sharp teeth and rough tongues. No follow-up questions were asked, although there were a few follow-up screams.

Nothing there but a distant airplane crawling across the sky, red blinking lights, vulnerable in the vast empty, faint red beacons flashing the message HELLO. A SMALL ISLAND OF LIFE UP HERE, VERY CLOSE TO SPACE. PRAY FOR US. PRAY FOR US.

That’s a simplification. Just because something eventually doesn’t work out doesn’t mean it never worked out. It was working out fine until, not much later, it wasn’t working out at all. Happiness is not canceled out by unhappiness. A relationship is not canceled out by its end.

Josie produced a glass of water, through practiced manipulation of cupboards and valves and municipal plumbing. Neither she nor Jackie was impressed with the human miracle represented by how easily the glass of water was produced.

Diane, what does it mean when you know you’re feeling something but you don’t know what that feeling is?” Diane considered this seriously for a long time. “It means you’re growing older.” “I never grow older.” “I guess we all thought that once.

The Night Vale PTA released a statement today saying that if the School Board could not promise to prevent children from learning about dangerous activities like drug use and library science during recess periods, they would be blocking all school entrances with their bodies. They pulled hundreds of bodies out from trucks, saying, “We own all of these bodies and we will not hesitate to use them to create great flesh barricades if that is what it takes to prevent our children from learning.

All this time he had lived for the future. The future had been the firm ground he stood on, and the present was only the slight haze in the air. But now he understood that the future was a joke without a punch line and that whatever he had in the present was what he would always have. He did not have much in the present.

We have nothing to speak about. There never was. Words are an unnecessary trouble. Expression is time wasting away. Any communication is just a yelp in the darkness. I am speaking now but I am saying nothing. I am just making noises, and, as it happens, they are organized in words and you should not draw meaning from this.

Time is like wax, dripping from a candle flame. In the moment, it is molten and falling, with the capability to transform into any shape. Then the moment passes, and the wax hits the tabletop, and solidifies into the shape it will always be. It becomes the past, a solid, single record of what happened, still holding in its wild curves and contours the potential of every shape it could have held. It is impossible, no matter how blessed you are by luck or the government or some remote, invisible deity gently steering your life with hands made of moonlight and wind, it is impossible not to feel a little sad looking at that bit of wax, that bit of the past. It is impossible not to think of all the wild forms that wax now will never take. ... ... But then you remember, I remember, that we are even now in another bit of molten wax. We are in a moment and it is still falling, still volatile, and we will never be anywhere else. We will always be in that most dangerous, most exciting, most possible time of all: the now, where we never can know what shape the next moment will take. Stay tune fore... well, let's just find out together, shall we?