David Guterson Quotes & Sayings

Time made me change. I gradually woke up to the realization that this is who I am, an author, a public figure, and I couldn't just hide in my study, tapping away at the keyboard and pretend that I didn't have a role to play beyond stringing words together. — David Guterson

When it's time to confess, you don't know what you're saying. Are you telling the truth, or do you confuse your lies with reality? The question is comical. The answer is lost in the maelstroms of consciousness. It's even impossible to pretend, eventually, that the question wasn't asked. You've been kidding yourself about yourself for so long, you're someone else. Your you is just a fragile fabrication. Every morning, you have to wake up, assemble this busy, dissembling monster, and get him or her on his or her feet again for another round of fantasy. — David Guterson

How could they say that they truly loved each other? They had simply grown up together, been children together, and the proximity of it, the closeness of it, had produced in them love s illusion. And yet
on the other hand
what was love if it wasn't this instinct she felt ... — David Guterson

Today and in a good winter mood, someone not subject to seasonal affective disorder, someone with a generous — David Guterson

Fiction is socially meaningful. — David Guterson

What sustains me is to be with my family and to write. — David Guterson

They were taken from Anacortes on a train to a transit camp - the horse stables at the Puyallup fairgrounds. They lived in the horse stalls and slept on canvas army cots; at nine p.m. they were confined to their stalls; at ten p.m. they were made to turn out their lights, one bare bulb for each family. The cold in the stalls worked into their bones, and when it rained that night they moved their cots because of the leaks in the roof. The next morning, at six A.M., they slogged through mud to the transit camp mess hall and ate canned figs and white bread from pie tins and drank coffee out of tin cups. — David Guterson

The trick was to live here without hating yourself because all around you was hatred. — David Guterson

I think you have an obligation to share what you know as a writer. — David Guterson

When it comes time to sit down and write the next book, you're deathly afraid that you're not up to the task. That was certainly the case with me after Snow Falling on Cedars. — David Guterson

I was born in Washington State and have lived here for 42 plus years. — David Guterson

Losing is like knowing that, in the movie scene where a thousand die but the hero lives, you're one of the obliterated. — David Guterson

I have relaxed into my persona as an author, although I used to fight that. — David Guterson

The bottom line was that he didn't want to die. As far as he was concerned, death was the problem. The basic human problem. Everyone's problem. He wasn't any different from anyone else, but there was no consolation in that. — David Guterson

Even though I may not intend it when I set out to write the book, these places just emerge as major players in what I'm doing, almost as if they are insisting on it. — David Guterson

He decided then that he would love her forever no matter what came to pass. It was not so much a matter of deciding as accepting the inevitability of it. It made him feel better, though he felt perturbed, too, worried that this kiss was wrong. But from his point of view, at fourteen years old, their love was entirely unavoidable. It had started on the day they'd clung to his glass box and kissed in the sea, and now it must go on forever. He felt certain of this. — David Guterson

There are things in this universe that we cannot control, and then there are the things we can ... Let fate, coincidence, and accident conspire; human beings must act on reason. — David Guterson

I have been trying to think clearly about everything and to use all this distance to advantage. And here is what I've discovered. I don't love you, Ishmael. — David Guterson

There's a certain nostalgia and romance in a place you left. — David Guterson

I often heard about his cases and I often sat in on his trials. In the late 1960s when I was growing up I wanted to be a crusader like him but I didn't want to wear a suit and commute. — David Guterson

I can't tell you what to do, Ishmael. I've tried to understand what it's been like for you - having gone to war, having lost your arm, not having married or had children. I've tried to make sense of it all, believe me, I have - how it must feel to be you. But I must confess that, no matter how I try, I can't really understand you. There are other boys, after all, who went to war and came back home and pushed on with their lives. They found girls and married and had children and raised families despite whatever was behind them. But you - you went numb, Ishmael. And you've stayed numb all these years. — David Guterson

The strange thing was, he wanted to like everyone. He just couldn't find a way to do it. — David Guterson

There were guys who prayed at Tarawa,' said Ishmael. 'They still got killed, Mother. Just like the guys who didn't pray. It didn't matter either way. — David Guterson

I was totally absorbed in the real world, the politics, the history, the news, and I just couldn't find my way into the fictional world ... When I finally could return to writing the novel, it was in fits and starts. — David Guterson

To acclimate students to misery under the rubric that so doing prepares them for life is a cynical notion - and a horrifying one. — David Guterson

He had visited his family the evening before, eaten dinner with Renee and Chris, his grandson, in the pretence that everything was ordinary, but in fact to service his end-game ruse. He was going over the mountains, he'd said, to hunt for quail in willow canyons, he had no particular canyons in mind, he intended to return on Thursday evening, though possibly, if the hunting was good, he would return on Friday or Saturday. The lie was open-ended so that his family wouldn't start worrying until he'd been dead for as long as a week - so none would miss or seek him where he rotted silently in the sage. Ben imagined how it might be otherwise, his cancer a pestilent force in their lives, or a pall descending over them like ice, just as they'd begun to emerge from the pall of Rachel's death. The last thing they needed was for Ben to tell hem of his terminal colon cancer. — David Guterson

His cynicism - a veteran's cynicism - was a thing that disturbed him all the time. It seemed to him after the war that the world was thoroughly altered. It was not even a thing you could explain to anybody, why it was that everything was folly. People appeared enormously foolish to him. He understood that they were only animated cavities full of jelly and strings and liquids. He had seen the insides of jaggedly ripped-open dead people. He knew, for instance, what brains looked like spilling out of somebody's head. In the context of this, much of what went on in normal life seemed wholly and disturbingly ridiculous. — David Guterson

I know you'll think this is crazy, but all I want to do is hold you, and I think that if you'll let me do that just for a few seconds, I can walk away, and never speak to you again. — David Guterson

Ben remembered that in Italy, he and Rachel had slipped down between rows of apple trees on the plain of the Po, deep into the cool and dark of orchards, and there they had kissed with the sadness of newlyweds who know that their kisses are too poignantly tender and that their good fortune is subject, like all things, to the crush of time, which remorselessly obliterates what is most desired and pervades all that is beautiful. — David Guterson

Accident ruled every corner of the universe except the chambers of the human heart. — David Guterson

To die, he thought, was to escape passion's grasp, but that was the last thing he wanted. Instead he wished to be seized by passion and pinioned, held in its palm forever - he could not imagine any other existence as embracing any real happiness. — David Guterson

People appeared enormously foolish to him. He understood that they were only animated cavities full of jelly and strings and liquids. — David Guterson

The prospect of death in autumn, she said, was irrelevant next to its happy recognition of its participation in the life of the tree itself. — David Guterson

Post-modernism is dead because it didn't address human needs. — David Guterson

Tell the truth,' Nels said. 'Decide to tell the truth before it's too late. — David Guterson

I think of myself as a really happy person. — David Guterson

To deny that there was this dark side of life would be like pretending that the cold of winter was somehow only a temporary illusion, a way station on the way to the higher "reality" of long, warm, pleasant summers. But summer, it turned out, was no more real than the snow that melted in wintertime. — David Guterson

Writing became an obsessive compulsive habit but I had almost no money so I thought about being an urban firefighter and having lots of free time in which to write or becoming an English teacher and thinking about books and writers on a daily basis. That swayed me. — David Guterson

Oh, to be young. To still be one's own hero. — David Guterson

When I think about John William now, I think about someone who followed through, and then I'm glad not to have followed through, to still be breathing, to still be here with people, to still be walking in the mountains, and to still be uncertain
even with all this cash on hand
in a way I seem to have no choice about. I'm a hypocrite, of course, and I live with that, but I live. — David Guterson

A literary achievement of the highest order. — David Guterson

At one level you're condemned to the voice you have. But within those confines, you have a certain amount of freedom to range among your possible voices. — David Guterson

Cities produce in me melancholy or a tension I don't need. — David Guterson

What some people interpret as brooding melancholy is serenity. I don't feel required to grasp all the time. — David Guterson

The world was incomprehensibly intricate, and yet this forest made a simple sense in her heart that she felt nowhere else.
[S]he wanted only her own strawberry farm, the fragrance of the fields and the cedar trees, and to live simply in this place forever.
[S]he had fallen into loving him long before she knew herself, though it occurred to her now that she might never know herself, that perhaps no one ever does, that such a thing might not be possible.
[Y]ou should learn to say nothing that will cause you regret. You should not say what is not in your heart
or what is only in your heart for a moment. But you know this
silence is better. — David Guterson

To persevere is always a reflection of the state of one's inner life, one's philosophy and one's perspective — David Guterson

I say this because as an older man I am prone to ponder matters in the light of death in a way that you are not. I am like a traveler from Mars who looks down in astonishment at what passes here. And what I see is the same human frailty passed from generation to generation. What I see is again and again the same sad human frailty. We hate one another; we are the victims of irrational fears. And there is nothing in the stream of human history to suggest we are going to change this. But
I digress, confess that. I merely wish to point out that in the face of such a world you have only yourselves to rely on. You have only the decision you must make, each of you, alone. And will you contribute to the indifferent forces that ceaselessly conspire toward injustice? Or will you stand up against this endless tide and in the face of it be truly human? — David Guterson

He had watched her, after all, mourn her husband's death and it had been for her in part the discovery that grief could attach itself with permanence - something Ishmael had already discovered. It attached itself and then it burrowed inside and made a nest and stayed. It ate whatever was warm nearby, and then the coldness settled in permanently. You learned to live with it. — David Guterson

I write because something inner and unconscious forces me to. That is the first compulsion. The second is one of ethical and moral duty. I feel responsible to tell stories that inspire readers to consider more deeply who they are. — David Guterson

I was aware that there is an expectation that writers inevitably falter at this stage, that they fail to live up to the promise of their first successful book, that the next book never pleases the way the prior one did. It simply increased my sense of being challenged. — David Guterson

The whites, you see, are tempted by their egos and have no means to resist. We Japanese, on the other hand, know our egos are nothing. We bend our egos, all of the time, and that is where we differ. That is the fundamental difference, Hatsue. We bend our heads, we bow and are silent, because we understand that by ourselves, alone, we are nothing at all, dust in a strong wind, while the hakujin believes his aloneness is everything, his separateness is the foundation of his existence. He seeks and grasps, seeks and grasps for his separateness, while we seek union with the Greater Life - you must see that these are distinct paths we are traveling, Hatsue, the hakujin and we Japanese. — David Guterson

I'm interested in themes that endure from generation to generation. — David Guterson

We Japanese, on the other hand, know our egos are nothing. We bend our egos, all of the time, and that is where we differ. That is the fundamental difference, Hatsue. We bend our heads, we bow and are silent, because we understand that by ourselves alone, we are nothing at all, dust in a strong wind, while the 'hakujin' believes his aloneness is everything, his separateness is the foundation of his existence. He seeks and grasps, seeks and grasps for his separateness, while we seek union with the Greater Life
you must see that these are distinct paths we are travelling, Hatsue, the 'hakujin' and we Japanese (p. 176). — David Guterson

That the world was silent and cold and bare and that in this lay its terrible beauty — David Guterson

Everybody has a world, and that world is completely hidden until we begin to inquire. As soon as we do, that entire world opens to us and yields itself. And you see how full and complex it is. — David Guterson

An argument ensued about abundance, leisure, work, nature, and what a second girl kept calling 'the American way.' When I asked her what she meant by 'the American way,' she said, 'Basically the destruction of everything
the world, your happiness, your soul, everything. The complete package. Evil and war. That's who we are, Mr. Countryman.' — David Guterson

One thing has led to the next in my life, but like lines of a poem. I suppose I've thrown in my lot with love, and don't know any other way to go on breathing. — David Guterson

I don't feel anything either way. No feeling about it comes to me - it's not something I have a choice about. Isn't a feeling like that supposed to happen? I can't make a feeling like that up, can I? Maybe God just chooses certain people, and the rest of us - we can't feel Him. — David Guterson

The snowfall obliterated the borders between the fields and made Kabuo Miyamoto's long-cherished seven acres indistinguishable from the land that surrounded them. All human claims to the landscape were superseded, made null and void by the snow. The world was one world, and the notion that a man might kill another over some small patch of it did not make sense. — David Guterson

He didn't like very many people any more, or very many things either. He preferred not to be this way, but there it was, he was like that. His cynicism, a veteran's cynicism, was a thing that disturbed him all the time. — David Guterson

The color of the sky was like a length of white chalk turned on its side and rubbed into asphalt. Sanded
that was how the world looked, worked slowly down to no rough edges. — David Guterson

The real question is: How do you react? What do you do next? Evade responsibilities? Bury yourself in work? What do you do? All three of my novels take up that question, although none gives an answer. — David Guterson

He hoped it would snow recklessly and bring to the island the impossible winter purity, so rare and precious, he remembered fondly from his youth. — David Guterson

My father is a practicing criminal law attorney in the Seattle area. — David Guterson

I grew up in Seattle, but I always knew I wanted to leave. — David Guterson

my religion is home and all that attends it. — David Guterson

We should recognize that schools will never solve the bedrock problems of education because the problems are problems of families, of cultural pressures that the schools reflect and thus cannot really remedy. — David Guterson

The rain fell with such fervor that the world disappeared. — David Guterson

Everybody knows what God is,' said his mother. 'You feel what God is, don't you? — David Guterson

I became paralyzed as an artist with writer's block. — David Guterson

The place felt sinister, though. Your imagination can get the better of you where a road ends against a forest. — David Guterson

When I went to college I took a creative writing class and decided in a week to be a writer. — David Guterson

If disaster, so be it, they said to themselves. There was nothing to be done except what could be done. The rest
like the salt water around them, which swallowed the snow without effort, remaining what it was implacably
was out of their hands, beyond. — David Guterson

It doesn't matter who you are, how many awards you've won, how popular you are, or how much critical acclaim you've had. — David Guterson

Don Quixote is one that comes to mind in comparison to mine, in that they both involve journeys undertaken by older men. That is unusual, because generally the hero of a journey story is very young. — David Guterson

The status quo was rote memorization and recitation in classrooms thronged with passive children who were sternly disciplined when they expressed individual needs. — David Guterson

It's a brooding melancholy that haunts me. — David Guterson

I have traveled the entire state and spent a lot of time out of doors. So I have known the landscape of the Columbia Basin for quite a while, and I have had this strong feeling about it for many years. — David Guterson

None of those other things makes a difference. Love is the strongest thing in the world, you know. Nothing can touch it. Nothing comes close. If we love each other we're safe from it all. Love is the biggest thing there is. — David Guterson

I'd rather know I can trust you. So before you read what's in that thing, tell me a story that squares with its details and exonerate yourself in my eyes. Tell me the story you should have told the sheriff right off the bat, when it wasn't too late, when the truth might still have given you your freedom. When the truth might have done you some good. — David Guterson

As soon as he was gone, we opened, "Baucis and Philemon." An elderly couple living in a cottage, they're granted a wish by Jove. They confer in private before Philemon asks, "May one hour take us both away; let neither outlive the other." The wish is granted.
I said, "Simultaneous deaths? Why didn't they wish for eternal happiness instead? What else would anyone wish for?"
"They did wish for that," answered Jamie. — David Guterson

Satellites can see your thoughts, but not through rock,' is like something they might say. In John William's case, it was conscious hyperbole and therefore commentary. At one level, it was reefer-inspired. It was partly for fun. It was other things, too-but not derangement. I give no credence to the interpretation, and I knew him better than anybody. — David Guterson

Hemingway said the only way to write about a place is to leave it. — David Guterson

My book is traditional. It runs counter to the post-modern spirit. — David Guterson

[H]e had this view of things - that most human activity was utter folly, his own included, and that his existence in the world made others nervous. — David Guterson