“I wish they'd conduct a national poll to find out who feels out of place and who doesn't. Just to get the numbers, you know? To get a feel for how many of us there are. Sometimes at work I get the feeling that it's got to be right up against 100%. I’ll head out to the register to help out during the lunch rush and the new cashier will look so confused and lost, and then I’ll look at the customers she’s supposed to be helping, and they’ll look lost, too, and then when I sneak a glance toward the tables there’ll be all these people staring at their food or at each other with blank looks in their eyes. And I’ll think: Is this just me? Is everybody else actually fine, and I’m just trying to imagine that they’re like me? But I don’t think so. I’ve thought about this a lot, and I’m pretty sure that some ridiculous percentage of the population is walking around feeling like aliens. I think teenagers feel that all the time...”

“There are so many different kinds of ghosts.”

“I thought about the guy in the truck, the focus in his expression, and I felt like I already knew enough of the story to tell it to somebody else maybe better than either of its major players could.”

“To the left, just past the painting, on the other side of the hall, is the bathroom, the sort of open door that if cameras found it as they passed through the house in a horror movie would trigger a blast of synthesizers.”

“I was writing poetry, and the Mountain Goats was an outgrowth of that.”

“My father would tell me if I wasn't writing in meter verse, it wasn't poetry.”

“Metal isn't necessarily aggressive. There's metal that's contemplative, there's metal that's sad, and there's metal that's exuberant. No genre is limited in what it can express.”

“Most of my interests in terms of writing are dark, so it's discordant how much I try to lock into the vibe of wherever I'm at. Inhabiting the life of the imagination is the nature of survival strategy - you build yourself little worlds to enjoy.”

“I think 'The Sunset Tree' is really the album on which I really learned to trust other musicians, which is so important.”

“My feminism is what came squarely up against my faith. There's a lot of ecstatic post-patriarchal Christians who have stuff they do with that. But at that point, you're doing Christianity with a double-superscript. The Bible, and especially the book of Genesis, is pretty unapologetically patriarchal.”

“People like to say how much they like stuff, but with 'The Sunset Tree,' people shared stories about what it meant for them. And that stuff's so humbling and amazing.”