Big Fish Quotes

“When a man's stories are remembered, then he is immortal.”
― Daniel Wallace, Big Fish

“Dreams are what keep a man going.”
― Daniel Wallace, Big Fish

“The ending is always a surprise.”
― Daniel Wallace, Big Fish

“You’re not necessarily supposed to believe it…You’re just supposed to believe in it.”
― Daniel Wallace, Big Fish

“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.”
― Daniel Wallace, Big Fish

“He believed the stars were wishes, and that one day they would all come true.”
― Daniel Wallace, Big Fish

“Remembering a man's stories makes him immortal.”
― Daniel Wallace, Big Fish

“In the land of the dying, sentences go unfinished, you know how they're going to end.”
― Daniel Wallace, Big Fish

“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.”
― Daniel Wallace, Big Fish

“People were so cheap there... they ate beans to save on bubble bath.”
― Daniel Wallace, Big Fish

“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?”
― Daniel Wallace, Big Fish

“Being alone was lonely, but there was an even greater loneliness sometimes when he was surrounded by a lot of other people who were constantly making demands of him. He needed a break. C”
― Daniel Wallace, Big Fish

“The day Edward Bloom was born, it rained.”
― Daniel Wallace, Big Fish

“He thought she hung the moon. He actually believed this from time to time. He believed the moon wouldn’t have been there but that she’d hung it. He believed the stars were wishes, and that one day they would all come true. For her, his daughter. He had told her this when she was little to make her happy, and now that he was old he believed it, because it made him happy and because he was so very old. He”
― Daniel Wallace, Big Fish

“Still,” he says, “if I shared my doubts with you, about God and love and life and death, that’s all you’d have: a bunch of doubts. But now, see, you’ve got all these great jokes.” “They’re”
― Daniel Wallace, Big Fish

“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?”
― Daniel Wallace, Big Fish

“I look into his gray-blue dying eyes. We’re staring at each other, showing each other our last looks, the faces we’ll take with us into eternity, and I’m thinking how I wish I knew him better, how I wish we’d had a life together, wishing my father wasn’t such a complete and utter goddamn mystery to me...”
― Daniel Wallace, Big Fish

“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. 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. “Why”
― Daniel Wallace, Big Fish

“It was said he could charm anyone, just by walking through the room. It was said he was blessed with a special power. But my father was humble, and he said it wasn’t that at all. He just liked people, and people liked him. It was that simple, he said.”
― Daniel Wallace, Big Fish

“He was a big fish, even then.”
― Daniel Wallace, Big Fish

“The car is my father's magic carpet. Not only does it get him places, but it shows him places.”
― Daniel Wallace, Big Fish

“My father is on the roof. This is how I remember him sometimes. Well-dressed in a dark suit and shiny, slippery shoes, he is looking left, looking right, looking as far as his eyes will travel. Then, looking down, he sees me, and just as he begins to fall he smiles, and winks. All the way down he's looking at me–smiling, mysterious, mythic, an unknown quantity: my dad.”
― Daniel Wallace, Big Fish

“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.”
― Daniel Wallace, Big Fish

“I think,” I say after a while, waiting for the right words to come, “that if a man could be said to be loved by his son, then I think that man could be considered great.” For this is the only power I have, to bestow upon my father the mantle of greatness, a thing he sought in the wider world, but one that, in a surprise turn of events, was here at home all along.”
― Daniel Wallace, Big Fish

“Where do people need to go so badly they can't realise what is already here, outside the car window”
― Daniel Wallace, Big Fish

“Remembering a man’s stories makes him immortal, did you know that?”
― Daniel Wallace, Big Fish

“Lives have a way of getting on with themselves. But in the short run it will be hard.”
― Daniel Wallace, Big Fish

“But he liked to leave me laughing. This is how he wanted to remember me, and how he wanted to be remembered. Of all his great powers, this was perhaps his most extraordinary: at any time, at the drop of a hat, he could really break me up. T”
― Daniel Wallace, Big Fish

“So in a way it was true: as I grew, he shrank. And by this logic one day I would become a giant, and Edward would become nothing, invisible in the world. B”
― Daniel Wallace, Big Fish

“He stayed up with the eye all night, staring into its shiny blueness, seeing himself within it, until the sun, rising above the tree line the next morning, seemed to him to be the shining eye of some forgotten god. T”
― Daniel Wallace, Big Fish