Russell Banks Quotes & Sayings

But twins are like that. They behave in ways, especially regarding each other, that can seem very strange to someone who is not a twin himself. They have a morality that is different from ours-at least when they are young they do-because, unlike other children, they are not inclined to imitate adults until much later. To children who are twins, even when they are not identical, the other twin is both more or less real than everyone else in the family, and they deal with each other the way that we deal with ourselves alone. Which means that it's like twins are permanently stoned. I don't think that's an exaggeration. — Russell Banks

If you yourself are not a victim, you cannot claim to see the world as the victim does. — Russell Banks

Angry? Yes, I'm angry: I'd be a lousy lawyer if I weren't. — Russell Banks

We all lose our innocence soon enough; it's inescapable. Most of us aren't emotionally or intellectually ready for it until our thirties or even later, however, so when one loses it prematurely, in childhood and adolescence, through divorce or the sudden early death of a parent, it can leave one fixated on that loss for a lifetime. Because it's premature, it feels unnatural, violent and unnecessary, a permanent, gratuitous wounding, and it leaves one angry at the world, — Russell Banks

We pass between sea and sky with unaccountable, humiliating ease, as if there were no firmament between the firmaments, no above or below, here or there, now or then, with only the feeble conventions of language, our contrived principles, and our love of one another's light to keep our own light from going out; abandon any one of them, and we dissolve in darkness like salt in water. — Russell Banks

I can't help it, and I'm not sorry for it; I'm even a little proud. People think I'm cold and unfeeling, but that's a price I've always been willing to pay. The truth is that I'm beyond help; most people are; and it only angers me to see my sisters or my friends here in town wasting their time. To forestall or cover my anger, I jump in front of them, and suddenly I myself have turned into the person come to provide comfort, reassurance, help, whatever it is they originally desired to provide me with. I take their occasion and make it my own. — Russell Banks

A tattoo does that, it makes you think about your body like it's this special suit that you can put on or take off whenever you want and a new name if it's cool enough does the same thing. To have both at once is power. It's the kind of power as all those superheroes who have secret identities get from being able to change back and forth from one person into another. No matter who you think he is, man, the dude is always somebody else. — Russell Banks

It's a way of living with tragedy, I guess, to claim after it happens that you saw it coming, as if somehow you had already made the necessary adjustments beforehand. — Russell Banks

The way I feel about every book is this: you don't finish it, you abandon it. All of my books have in some sense failed, otherwise I wouldn't write another one. If I wrote the perfect book, I wouldn't have to write again, and I wouldn't want to. That's not true for everyone, but it's true for me. I could walk away then. But so far I haven't managed to do it. — Russell Banks

Like Neanderthals, men prefer to hunt alone or, if in a pack, at the head of it. Women, whether in the field or in a campfire, are collaborative, and when they hunt ... they work together. — Russell Banks

Thus, until we have truly become a democracy, every American, white as much as black, red, or yellow, lives not in his skin but on it. If one person is called "colored", let all be colored. — Russell Banks

Anyone can be a cause of his or her own destruction, but no one can claim individual responsibility for having created a great good. — Russell Banks

And there are people who want to be writers because they love to write. And they care. — Russell Banks

Luck can't last a lifetime unless you die young. — Russell Banks

Since my adolescence I have read two and sometimes three newspapers a day, frequently clipping an article that for obscure and soon forgotten reasons attracts me. I usually toss the clippings into a desk drawer, and later, often years later, I'll find myself reading through the clippings, throwing most of them out. It fills me with a strange sadness, a kind of grief for my lost self, as if I were reading and throwing out old diaries. — Russell Banks

From then on, we were simply different people. Not new people; different. — Russell Banks

a fully flowered narcissist. — Russell Banks

Go, my book, and help destroy the world as it is. — Russell Banks

Later, I learned that people thought I was being courageous. Not so. There were selfish reasons for my behavior. I shoved everyone away and kept more or less to myself, silent, stone-faced, although continuing nonetheless to help the other men, as we received one child after another from the divers and wrapped them in blankets and dispatched them in stretchers up the steep slope to the road and the waiting ambulances, as if by doing that I could somehow prolong this part of the nightmare and postpone waking up to what I knew would be the inescapable and endless reality of it. No one spoke. Somehow, at the bottom, I did not want this awful work to end. That's not courage. — Russell Banks

So the same cultural and political issues that divided us in 1968 are still dividing us. — Russell Banks

Of all the animals on this planet, we are surely the nastiest, the most deceitful, the most murderous and vile. Despite our God, or because of him. Both. — Russell Banks

We know that people we love are both good and bad, but we expect strangers to be one or the other. — Russell Banks

All those happy, pretty, successful people- he hated them because he knew they didn't really exist, and he hated even more the magazine that glorified them and in a way that made them exist, actors, rock musicians, famous writers, politicians. Those aren't people, he fumed, they're photographs. — Russell Banks

In some countries, I said to myself, the only life you can properly desire is that of destroyer. — Russell Banks

I've got nothing against outsiders, per se, you understand. It's just that you have to love a town before you can live in it right, and you have to live in it before you can love it right. Otherwise, you're a parasite of sorts. — Russell Banks

No, because I am not a ventriloquist. — Russell Banks

Driving home, it's all I can do to keep from crying. Time's come, time's gone, time's never returning, I say to myself. What's here in front of me is all I've got, I decide, and as I drive my car through the blowing snow it doesn't seem like much, except for the kindness that I've just exchanged with an old lady, so I concentrate on that. — Russell Banks

The Cop. She has a steel grid in front of her mind, and for anything in the outer world to reach her it first has to squeeze through the bars of that grid. Information has to be broken into small cubes; information and data packaged in two-dimensional squares are preferable to three-dimensional cubes however: they pass through the grid more quickly and once they reach the Cop's mind take up less space there. — Russell Banks

I much prefer working with kids whose life could be completely upended by a reading of a book over a weekend. You give them a book to read - they go home and come back a changed person. And that is so much more interesting and exciting. — Russell Banks

A couple of years I taught in graduate programs at NYU and Columbia, in the early eighties. — Russell Banks

What I am finding now is that my audience is getting younger as I get older, which is a very good thing as you know - you don't want them to get older as you get older. — Russell Banks

my blue eyes peering into their brown eyes and seeing there some essential part of myself, some irreducible aspect of my being, which in turn gave them back the same reflected version of themselves — Russell Banks

Chimpanzees are endangered. Severely. — Russell Banks

Lists of books we re-read and books we can't finish tell more about us than about the relative worth of the books themselves — Russell Banks

If you dedicate your attention to discipline in your life you become smarter while you are writing than while you are hanging out with your pals or in any other line of work. — Russell Banks

For instance, a man generally doesn't even know how small a woman is until he holds an article of her clothing up in front of him, one of her nightgowns, say, and sees how small and flimsy it is and how like a child's and unlike his own, and how thick and heavy his hands seem. — Russell Banks

I was afraid of the consequences of my acts in the right way, beyond guilt, but it was too late. I'd already become the person I should have been afraid of becoming. — Russell Banks

I began as a boy with artistic talent ... as a visual artist ... I thought that was what I'd become and in my late teens drifted into reading serious literature. — Russell Banks

But on the other hand, I don't actively seek out stories or hunt them down. — Russell Banks

It's coming to seem the only way to avoid hurting other people, which in his experience is what gives them power over you. — Russell Banks

Through writing, through that process, they realize that they become more intelligent, and more honest and more imaginative than they can be in any other part of their life. — Russell Banks

Mourning can be very selfish. When someone you love has died, you tend to recall best those few moments and incidents that helped clarify your sense, not of the person who has died, but of your own self. — Russell Banks

By this evening," he declared, "we will all know who we are and what we're doing here! — Russell Banks

it is when a white person resists the privilege of turning colorless that he frees himself, at least partially from the sickness of racialism. — Russell Banks

I don't want it to be all that self-conscious or artificial, but it really grows out of my having invented myself as a listener so that I could hear her voice. — Russell Banks

Much more than memoir; it's history. — Russell Banks

Poor, deluded fools. Because their skin's as white as the rich man's, they believe that they might someday be rich themselves. But without the Negro, Owen, these men would be forced to see that, in fact, they have no more chance of becoming rich than do the very slaves they despise and trample on. They'd see how close they are to being slaves themselves. Thus, to protect and nurture their dream of becoming someday, somehow, rich, they don't need actually to own slaves, so much as they need to keep the Negro from ever being free. — Russell Banks

And out of a desire essentially to imitate what I was reading, I began to write, like a clever monkey. — Russell Banks

Loyalty is weird, it kicks in when you dont expect it and the people who deserve loyalty least seem to get it the most. — Russell Banks

When you have never done a thing before and that thing is not simply and clearly right or wrong, you frequently do not know if it is a cruel thing, you just go ahead and do it. Maybe later you'll be able to determine whether you acted cruelly. Too late, of course, but at least you'll know. — Russell Banks

Nobody does anything for one reason. — Russell Banks

Because it's anger that drives us and delivers us. It's not any kind of love either-love for the underdog or the victim, or whatever you want to call them. Some litigators like to claim that. The losers. — Russell Banks

The only way I could go on living was to believe I was not living. — Russell Banks

When an old man and a young man work together, it can make an ugly sight or a pretty one, depending on who's in charge. If the young man's in charge or won't let the old man take over, the young man's brute strength becomes destructive and inefficient, and the old man's intelligence, out of frustration, grows cruel and inefficient. Sometimes the old man forgets that he is old and tries to compete with the young man's strength, and then it's a sad sight. Or the young man forgets that he is young and argues with the old man about how to do the work, and that's a sad sight, too. — Russell Banks

Believes in God the way he believes in politicians-he knows He exists but doesn't count on Him for anything. — Russell Banks

[ ... ] I could no longer believe even in life. Which meant that I had come to be the reverse, the opposite of a Christian. For me, now, the only reality is death. — Russell Banks

Although I still occasionally paint and draw, my life has now been shaped by my writing. — Russell Banks

Actually I dont know if it ever works out unless you are standing in the middle of the street and dont see the ten-ton truck coming and this good guy pushes you out of the way and says its for your own good. — Russell Banks

The United States particularly abandoned Liberia after the end of the Cold War. — Russell Banks

He said, Yeah, well, artists are a lot like gangsters. They both know that the official version, the one everyone else believes, is a lie. — Russell Banks

The 60s passed and faded and I grew older, and in 1987 bought a house in upstate New York, and it turned out that John Brown was buried down the road from my house and that he had lived there longer than anywhere else and his house was still standing. — Russell Banks

There is a wonderful intelligence to the unconscious. It's always smarter than we are. — Russell Banks

He can't quite picture God except as a huge ball of light with an old man's deep voice like in the pickup truck ads on TV coming out of the ball of light dictating the way everything in Eden is supposed to work. — Russell Banks

They were gone and I missed them but even so I was very happy. For the rest of my life no matter where on this planet earth I went and no matter how scared or confused I got, I could wait until dark and look up into the night sky and see my three friends again and my heart would swell with love of them and make me strong and clearheaded. — Russell Banks

Before you lose your children, you can talk about it-as a possibility, I mean [ ... ] But when the thing that you only imagined actually happens, you quickly discover that you can barely speak of it. Your story is jumbled and mumbled, out of sync and unfocused. At least that's how it has been for me. — Russell Banks

Secrets and lies, they eat your insides until all you have left is a hard thin skin that covers you like the shell of one of those eggs you poke a little hole in and draw out its eggy contents before you dye it for Easter. — Russell Banks

Abbott says, 'Biggest ... difference ... between ... people ... is ... quality ... of ... attention.' And since a person's quality of attention is one of the few things about her that a human can control, then she better damn well do it, say I. Put that together with the Golden Rule in a nutshell, and you've got my philosophy of life. Abbott's too. And you don't need religion for that. — Russell Banks

Just to show you how far I was from predicting the accident or suspecting that it could occur-even though, except for Dolores Driscoll, who drove the bus, I was surely the person in town closest to the event, the only eyewitness, you might say-at the moment it occurred I was thinking of fucking Risa Walker. — Russell Banks

Boys like it when you talk to them as if they were grown men - at least he always did when he was a kid - because they pretend that's what they are anyhow, grown-up men, and they do it for their entire lives. — Russell Banks

The received truth of history is shot through and falsified by unknown secrets carried to the grave. — Russell Banks

For almost anyone who chooses to be a writer, since so very few writers are able to learn a living from their work that is equivalent to the living earned by the average dentist or accountant. — Russell Banks

Public libraries are the sole community centers left in America. The degree to which a branch of the local library is connected to the larger culture is a reflection of the degree to which the community itself is connected to the larger culture. — Russell Banks

I kept driving straight on toward what we called home and could not say aloud the words that were thrashing me, as if somehow by remaining silent I could keep the terrible thing from having occurred. — Russell Banks

It's hard to know more about a person's life than what that person wants you to know. — Russell Banks

We are the planet, fully as much as water, earth, fire and air are the planet, and if the planet survives, it will only be through heroism. Not occasional heroism, a remarkable instance of it here and there, but constant heroism, systematic heroism, heroism as governing principle. — Russell Banks

Storytelling is an ancient and honorable act. An essential role to play in the community or tribe. It's one that I embrace wholeheartedly and have been fortunate enough to be rewarded for. — Russell Banks

John Brown first swam into my vision in the 1960s when I was a political activist in the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement at Chapel Hill, where I went to university. — Russell Banks

It's a landscape that controls you, sits you down and says, Shut up, pal, I'm in charge here. — Russell Banks

It was strange to stand there in front of the mirror and see myself like I was my own best friend, a kid wanted to hang with forever. This was a boy I could travel to the seacoasts with, a boy I'd like to meet up with in foreign cities like Calcutta and London and Brazil, a boy I could trust who also had a good sense of humor and liked smoked oysters from a can and good weed and the occasional 40 ounces of malt. If I was going to be alone for the rest of my life this was the person I wanted to be alone with. — Russell Banks

Our sins describe us, and our prohibitions describe our sins. — Russell Banks

What you believe matters, however. It's all anyone has to act on. And since what you do is who you are, your actions define you. If you don't believe anything is true simply because you can't logically prove what's true, you won't do anything. You won't be anything. You'll end up spending your life in a rocking chair looking out at the horizon waiting for an answer that never comes. You might as well be dead. It's an old philosophical problem. — Russell Banks

They were the only three people I'd chosen on my own to love, and they were gone. But still, that morning in Mobay when I saw Russ for the last time, I saw clearly for the first time that loving Sister Rose and I-Man and even Bruce had left me with riches that I could draw on for the rest of my life, I was totally grateful to them. — Russell Banks

First of all it's usually women who run these higher primate sanctuaries, rarely men. They are white. They come from privileged backgrounds. They are educated. — Russell Banks

Our obsession with each other was like the isolation that comes with great pain; it was like extreme sadness. Without our children we might have never discovered our differences, which is what has made our abiding love for each other possible. — Russell Banks

My major allegiance has been to storytelling, not to history. — Russell Banks

Motivations are too tangled and complex. — Russell Banks

John had once said to me, in a complaining tone, that Father had taught us to be afraid of no man except him. And it was true. Father always insisted that we think for ourselves in every way, except when we disagreed with him, and that we hold ourselves independent of every man's will, except his. He wanted us simultaneously to be independent and yet to serve him. Father was to be our Abraham; we were to be his little Isaacs. We were supposed to know ahead of time, however, the happy outcome of the story - we were supposed to know that it was a story, not about us and our willingness to lie on a rock on Mount Moriah and be sacrificed under his knife, but about our father and his willingness to obey his terrible God. — Russell Banks

Biology doesn't matter, the Christians argued, because this body we live in is not ultimately real; history doesn't matter, they said, because God's time is different and superior to man's anyhow; and forget cause and effect, forget what you've been told about the physical world, because there is heaven and there is hell and there is this green earth in between, and you are always alive in one of the three places. — Russell Banks

She was like a stranger to me then, a stranger whose life had just been made utterly meaningless. I know this because I felt the same way. Meaning had gone wholly and and in one clot right out of my life too, and as result I'm sure I was like a stranger to her as well. Our individual pain was so great that that we could not recognize any other. — Russell Banks

A dog-it was a dog I saw for certain. Or thought I saw. It was snowing pretty hard by then, and you can see things in the snow that aren't there, or aren't exactly there, so that by God when you do see something, you react anyhow, erring on the distaff side, if you get my drift. That's my training as a driver, but it's also my temperament as a mother of two grown sons and wife to an invalid, and that way when I'm wrong at least I'm wrong on the side of the angels. — Russell Banks

It's hard to spend years at a time working in total solitude with no reality-check. — Russell Banks

Choose your agent as carefully as you would choose your accountant or lawyer. Or dentist. — Russell Banks

I'm the kind of person who always follows the manual. No shortcuts. — Russell Banks

You must not obey a majority, no matter how large, if it opposes your principles and opinions.' He said this to each new volunteer and repeated it over and over to him, until it was engraved on his mind. 'The largest majority is often only an organized mob whose noise can no more change the false into the true than it can change black into white or night into day. And a minority, conscious of its rights, if those rights are based on moral principles, will sooner or later become a just majority. — Russell Banks

One hates a person for the same reason one loves him — Russell Banks

Photographs of them alive and smiling would have made me cry and fall down and beat the earth with my fists; their actual dead faces only sealed me off from myself. — Russell Banks

The best thing about writing programs is that it rationalized the apprenticeship of a writer. — Russell Banks

It's like a crime is an act that when you've committed one the act is over and you haven't changed inside. But when you commit a sin it's like you create a condition that you have to live in. — Russell Banks

They were totally alone, those kids, like each had been accidentally sent to earth from a distant planet to live among adult humans and be dependent on them for everything because compared to the adult humans they were extremely fragile creatures and didn't know the language or how anything here worked and hadn't arrived with any money. And because they were like forbidden by the humans to use their old language they'd forgotten it so they couldn't be much company or help to each other either. They couldn't even talk about the old days and so pretty soon they forgot there ever were any old days and all there was now was life on earth with adult humans who called them children and acted toward them like they owned them and like they were objects not living creatures with souls. — Russell Banks

But really, it was reading that led me to writing. And in particular, reading the American classics like Twain who taught me at an early age that ordinary lives of ordinary people can be made into high art. — Russell Banks