Other David Guterson Quotes & Sayings

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

Fiction is socially meaningful. — 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

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

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

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

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 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

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

my religion is home and all that attends it. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[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

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