Pan Quotes

“And the color…No one knows how color really looks to anyone else. It’s the definition of a private experience. All we share are the names.”
― Michael Clune, Pan

“You can make a church of any bad thing.”
― Michael Clune, Pan

“He said Tod would be dead in him at least; Ty would be the level on which Tod was no more. Ty made his own heart into Tod’s grave.”
― Michael Clune, Pan

“I remembered the day my parents told me they were getting divorced. I had just turned twelve. It may even have been my birthday, though I couldn’t be sure. All I really remember is that it was a hot, bright July day. The world, heated to the degree necessary to break a family. In my memory there are no shadows in that day. No dark, cool spots. Everything relentlessly bright and hot. And windy. Wind blowing everywhere, I remember that especially, a wind without any cooling in it—a wind with no connection to the earth—blowing in space—loose—heated air whirling in bright blue distances.”
― Michael Clune, Pan

“People will make a church out of any bad thing.”
― Michael Clune, Pan

“You couldn’t stop characters in books from growing real faces when you closed your eyes.”
― Michael Clune, Pan

“Every time I closed my eyes, I grew weaker, more exhausted, less capable of resistance to the occult symbols of Pan: brown light, mouse, Sisyphus, Carl, Ace…”
― Michael Clune, Pan

“It turns out it’s almost impossible to look sad when you are in pain. If you see a sad expression on a person’s face it’s practically a guarantee they are not in pain. The sad face is ice-cold, I thought, as pain and anger burned my cheeks. The sad expression is a form of social control practiced by individuals more or less completely free of pain.”
― Michael Clune, Pan

“Much later, when I read Ian Kershaw’s biography of Hitler, I grasped it intellectually. Kershaw wrote that Hitler himself could never keep track of everything happening in a nation as large and dynamic as the Germany of the nineteen thirties. He didn’t have time to come into your office or kitchen or barracks or concentration camp and tell you what to do. Instead of dictating exactly how everyone should act, Hitler became a Sign pointing in a Direction. Everyone could look at their own situation and ask themselves—which direction is Hitlerward? And anyone could know this is the direction of Hitler—a slightly bigger flag in the yard, boots a little shinier, a bit less tolerance here, a harder attitude there… So each person moved themselves, little by little, in the direction of the Leader. And the whole German world sailed Hitlerward at a speed that no level of totalitarian top-down control could produce. Kershaw called this the “working towards the Führer” theory.”
― Michael Clune, Pan

“The kind of revelation that starts a church. A church is a building made to conceal a god. The simplest church is just a building with a box inside with a little door. A tabernacle. On one side of the little door is one or more people, on the other side is the god. When the door is closed, the god is the god, and the people are the people. But if the door opens, no one knows who they are. Or what they are.”
― Michael Clune, Pan

“Neither of us had eaten, but I didn’t feel hungry. Eating seemed superfluous to me. I never felt hungry with Sarah. If we lived together, I thought irrelevantly, my body would gradually cease to exist.”
― Michael Clune, Pan

“The word panic is derived from the god Pan, and originally referred to the sudden fear aroused by the presence of a god.”
― Michael Clune, Pan

“And geometry, come on. I just couldn’t take geometry seriously anymore. The whole point of spring is that it ruins geometry. All the angles get pushed out or covered up, shapes grow over shapes.”
― Michael Clune, Pan

“Cool is minimal consciousness. Approximation of the smooth, unblinking surface of polished stone or metal. Cool is alliance with the endless strength of the inorganic.”
― Michael Clune, Pan

“The coolest eyes are dead eyes.”
― Michael Clune, Pan

“But then Matt was an intrinsically cool guy. He genuinely didn’t care what anyone else thought about him. He didn’t even seem to know. If you had that quality, you could do a dance routine to “Stayin’ Alive” in front of everyone at Carmel Catholic High School and it would go over great.”
― Michael Clune, Pan

“When you’re fifteen, your body and mind are still tied to nature. The seasons start inside you. God fashions the new season out of interior materials. You discover the season, now you’re performing it. You’re winter, you’re spring. And the things around start to mimic you. It’s why the change in seasons feels like prophecy. It’s why, when you grow older and the link between you and nature snaps, you get nostalgic when the seasons change.”
― Michael Clune, Pan

“As long as I kept reading I didn’t have to think about this too much. When you’re reading, the words of the book borrow the voice in your head. Words need a voice. The voice they use when you read is your voice. It’s the voice your thoughts talk in. So if you give the voice to the book, your thoughts have no voice. They have to wait for the ends of paragraphs. They have to hold their breath until the chapter breaks.”
― Michael Clune, Pan

“Cheap housing’s always more or less exposed. There was a housing project in Chicago where they found a four-year-old girl dead of old age. That was the coroner’s conclusion, after examining her organs. It happened in the nineties.”
― Michael Clune, Pan

“We lived in a small subdivision of town houses surrounded by empty land waiting to be developed. No sidewalks. No one knew anyone. No one’s face held any kind of future for any neighbor, and so you couldn’t even remember what the people who lived right next to you looked like.”
― Michael Clune, Pan

“Good writing, I came to believe, was the careful, painstaking replacement of each part of this world with a part that looked the same, but was deeper, more mysterious, richer.”
― Michael Clune, Pan

“When there’s nothing solid behind the present moment, when there’s no real past, no tradition, when everything’s basically exposed to the future, everything’s constantly flying away into the hole of the future, money is the next best thing.”
― Michael Clune, Pan

“In the same way, Ace was a direction. More vibrancy, more color, more boldness, more intensity—this was the direction the store—with its bouncy music, its garish colors, its tools like animal bodies, like body traps, its inescapable, shadowless lighting—pointed. The deathly spiritual threat I longed to escape through sensory intensities was in fact inexorably carried forward on a tide of louder sounds, sharper colors, more intense sensations. Even sex, I thought in horror standing one day in the aisle at Musicland, even sex with Sarah was in the direction of Ace! The true escape, I realized, stopping suddenly in the colorless desert of the classical music section, was not a tear or a rip in the Ace substance, but a small, unobtrusive fold.”
― Michael Clune, Pan

“So each person moved themselves, little by little, in the direction of the Leader. And the whole German world sailed Hitlerward at a speed that no level of totalitarian top-down control could produce. Kershaw called this the “working towards the Führer” theory.”
― Michael Clune, Pan

“The brightest color imaginable, the most shocking sounds—all that was in the direction of Ace. At the time, I intuited this. Much later, when I read Ian Kershaw’s biography of Hitler, I grasped it intellectually. Kershaw wrote that Hitler himself could never keep track of everything happening in a nation as large and dynamic as the Germany of the nineteen thirties. He didn’t have time to come into your office or kitchen or barracks or concentration camp and tell you what to do. Instead of dictating exactly how everyone should act, Hitler became a Sign pointing in a Direction. Everyone could look at their own situation and ask themselves—which direction is Hitlerward? And anyone could know this is the direction of Hitler—a slightly bigger flag in the yard, boots a little shinier, a bit less tolerance here, a harder attitude there…”
― Michael Clune, Pan