David Wroblewski Quotes & Sayings

You couldn't change a river into a sea, but you could trace a new channel for it to follow. — David Wroblewski

Do you actually think that how long a person grieves is a measure of how much they loved someone? — David Wroblewski

He had not opened his eyes in the moment. Her touch had released some tiny increment of the poison bound up in him that would, days to come, ripen into sorrow. And by the time he thought all this he could no longer tell if her caress had truly happened or whether he'd manufactured it out of necessity. — David Wroblewski

In that dilated moment after sunset when the sky holds all the light ... — David Wroblewski

In her life, she'd been nourished and sustained by certain things, him being one of them, Trudy another, and Edgar, the third and most important, but it was really the three of them together, intersecting in her, for each of them powered her heart in a different way. — David Wroblewski

That mirror, that's one I hate to let go, he said. That was my daughter's the whole time she was growing up. It probably seen her more than me
everything from a baby up to twenty years old. Sometimes I wonder if all that might still be inside it. Got to make an impression on a thing, reflecting the same person every day. — David Wroblewski

You swam in a river of chance and coincidence. You clung to the happiest accidents - the rest you let float by. — David Wroblewski

Nothing is going to happen to me, or you, for that matter.
Anything can happen, though.
Anything can happen. But most always, just normal things happen, and people have happy lives. — David Wroblewski

You can fight it or you accept it. The only difference is, if you accept it, you can get to do other things. If you fight it, you're stuck in the same spot forever — David Wroblewski

And from the look on his face I could see he was one of the lucky ones, one of those people who like doing what they're good at. That's rare. When you see that in a person, you can't miss it. — David Wroblewski

She needed to recover. His father had died in January; it was only the end of May. They needed to stick to the routine they'd established during the intervening months. in that way, their life would return to its original shape, like a spring stretched in bad times but contracting eventually into happiness. That the world could come permanently unsprung had never occurred to him. — David Wroblewski

My childhood was spent with dogs, and I work with dogs surrounding me. This relationship is hardly unique - man-and-dog stories date back to ancient history, up to 10,000 years ago - but it feels that way to me. I used to have a love-hate relationship with dog stories because some got the dynamic right but most were dead wrong. — David Wroblewski

Come morning, his memory would be of a night spent watching over them all. And each of them - dog and boy, mother and old man - would feel the same. — David Wroblewski

It was one of the many rules in the kennel, rules that didn't always make sense, or even seem important, until some situation drew the lesson out. — David Wroblewski

We'll know we've got it right when they choose for themselves, he used to say.
That doesn't make sense.
'That's what I thought too. I asked him what he meant, but he just shrugged. I don't think he knew himself. But I keep thinking maybe that stray is making exactly the kind of choice he talked about. We're talking about an adult dog, a dog that's been out in the woods for a long time, trying to decide whether or not we can be trusted. Whether this is his place. And it matters to him - he'd rather starve than make the wrong decision. — David Wroblewski

It is as true for the writer as for the reader that any novel worth its ink should be an experience first and foremost - not an essay, not a statement, not an orderly rollout of themes and propositions. All of which is to say: stories, too, are wild things. — David Wroblewski

The man took another long look at the dogs. "When they start chewing on things, try to steer them over to that chair, would you?" He jerked his thumb at an overstuffed armchair in the corner. It was upholstered in orange and brown. Images of ducks were involved in the pattern. "I hate that chair," he said. Edgar looked at him, trying to decide if he was making a joke. — David Wroblewski

If you didn't like it, why didn't you quit?
To do what? Wasn't anything I knew better than farming. I was cursed, that was the problem. Just because I didn't like it didn't mean I wasn't good at it ... It's a curse all right, you're just too young to know about that sort of thing. To be good at something you don't care about? — David Wroblewski

I grew up in the middle of dairy country in Wisconsin, about as far from any major metropolitan area as you can get. I always assumed I was going to be an actor. I don't know why. I didn't have any reason to think that. In fact, when I finally did try it, when I was in college, I was really bad at it and didn't enjoy it. — David Wroblewski

It was one thing to live in a world where death stood a distant figure, quite another to hold it in your hands. — David Wroblewski

She had learned, in her life, that time lived inside you. You are time, you breathe time. When she'd been young, she'd had an insatiable hunger for more of it, though she hadn't understood why. Now she held inside her a cacophony of times and lately it drowned out the world. The apple tree was still nice to lie near. They peony, for its scent, also fine. When she walked through the woods (infrequently now) she picked her way along the path, making way for the boy inside to run along before her. It could be hard to choose the time outside over the time within. — David Wroblewski

I set writing aside when I went into theater, and then I set theater aside and subsequently had about a 25-year career in software development. Which, by the way, is a very creative field. I equate it more to kinetic sculpture than anything else, as an activity. — David Wroblewski

A person could stop a specific thing, but they couldn't stop change in general. Rivers can't run backward. Yet, he felt there must be an alternative, neither willfulness nor resignation. He couldn't put words to it. All he knew was, neither of them had changed their minds and neither of them could find anything more to say. — David Wroblewski

When you're making something big, whether it's long-form fiction or a big piece of software, whatever that is, you're having a very intimate and extended conversation with the work materials themselves. — David Wroblewski

No one can say if you are that person who, given good paint, good brushes, and a fine canvas, can produce something better than the factory man. That is, and has always been, beyond the realm of science. You do have the attitude of the dreamer about you. For that reason, I haven't the heart to argue anymore about this - it is a hopeless talk. And for a simple factory man like me, an effort must be abandoned once its hopelessness is exposed. Only the artist perseveres in such circumstances. — David Wroblewski

The strangest kind of curse had been laid upon him: knowledge without hope of evidence. — David Wroblewski

When she walked through the woods (infrequently now) she picked her way along the path, making way for the boy inside to run along before her. It could be hard to choose the time outside over the time within. Almondine from The Story of Edgar Sawtelle — David Wroblewski

Almondine
Eventually, she understood the house was keeping a secret from her.
All that winter and all through the spring Almondine had known something was going to happen, but no matter where she looked she couldn't find it. Sometimes, when she entered a room, there was the feeling that the thing that was going to happen had just been there, and she would stop and pant and peer around while the feeling seeped away as mysteriously as it had arrived. Weeks might pass without a sign, and then a night would come, when, lying nose to tail beneath the window in the kitchen corner, listening to the murmur of conversation and the slosh and clink of dishes being washed, she felt it in the house again and she whisked her tail in long, pensive strokes across the baseboards and silently collected her feet beneath her and waited. When half an hour passed and nothing appeared, she groaned and sighed and rolled onto her back and waited to see if it was somewhere in her sleep. — David Wroblewski

Others dreamed of finding a person in the world whose soul was made in their mirror image, but Almondine and Edgar had been conceived nearly together, grown up together, and however strange it might be, she was his other. Much could be endured for that. — David Wroblewski

So a dog's value came from the training AND the breeding. And by breeding, Edgar supposed he meant both the bloodlines - the particular dogs in their ancestry - and all the information in the file cabinets. Because the files, with their photographs, measurements, notes, charts, cross-references, and scores, told the STORY of the dog - what a MEANT as his father put it. — David Wroblewski

Just when normal life felt almost possible - when the world held some kind of order, meaning, even loveliness (the prismatic spray of light through an icicle; the stillness of a sunrise), some small thing would go awry and the veil of optimism was torn away, the barren world revealed. They learned, somehow, to wait those times out. There was no cure, no answer, no reparation. — David Wroblewski

Some things were certain - they had already happened - but the future could not be divined. Perhaps by Ida Paine. For everyone else, the future was no ally. A person had only his life to barter with. He felt that way. He could lose himself ... or trade what he had for something he cared about. That rare thing. Either way, his life would be spent. — David Wroblewski

That was how it was, sometimes. You put yourself in front of the thing and waited for whatever was going to happen and that was all. It scared you and it didn't matter. You stood and faced it. There was no outwitting anything. When Almondine had been playful, she had been playful in the face of that knowledge, as defiant as before the rabid thing. Sometimes you looked the thing in the eye and it turned away. Sometimes it didn't. — David Wroblewski

Edgar, do you actually think that how long a person grieves is a measure of how much they loved someone? There's no rule book that says how to do this." She laughed, bitterly. "Wouldn't that be great? No decisions to make. Everything laid right out for us. But there's no such thing. You want facts, don't you? Rules. Proof. You're like your father that way. Just because a thing can't be logged, charted, and summarized doesn't mean it isn't real. Half the time we walk around in love with the idea of a thing instead of the reality of it. But sometimes things don't turn out that way. You have to pay attentin to what's real, what's in the world. Not some imaginary alternative, as if it's a choice we could make. — David Wroblewski

Say 'Ah.'"
A-H-H-H-H, he fingerspelled.
Doctor Frost glanced at his mother.
"He just said 'ah' for you," she said weakly, and smiling.
"Okay, sense of humor intact," the doctor said. "Try anyway. — David Wroblewski