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Top David Guterson Quotes

Browse top 37 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by David Guterson.

Favorite David Guterson Quotes

1. "It's a brooding melancholy that haunts me." ~ David Guterson
2. "I grew up in Seattle, but I always knew I wanted to leave." ~ David Guterson
3. "There's a certain nostalgia and romance in a place you left." ~ David Guterson
4. "What some people interpret as brooding melancholy is serenity. I don't feel required to grasp all the time." ~ David Guterson
5. "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
6. "My father is a practicing criminal law attorney in the Seattle area." ~ David Guterson
7. "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
8. "Cities produce in me melancholy or a tension I don't need." ~ David Guterson
9. "Hemingway said the only way to write about a place is to leave it." ~ David Guterson
10. "I became paralyzed as an artist with writer's block." ~ David Guterson
11. "I have relaxed into my persona as an author, although I used to fight that." ~ David Guterson
12. "I'm not an urban person." ~ David Guterson
13. "My book is traditional. It runs counter to the post-modern spirit." ~ David Guterson
14. "What sustains me is to be with my family and to write." ~ David Guterson
15. "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
16. "'I question the questioning of his sanity,' says Metzger. 'To me, he was simply passionate about the right things. He had a valid critique of the world and made it. If that's insanity, something's wrong. Personally, I think there's something wrong. With the world and not with John William.'" ~ David Guterson
17. "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
18. "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
19. "That the world was silent and cold and bare and that in this lay its terrible beauty" ~ David Guterson
20. "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
21. "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
22. "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
23. "The rain fell with such fervor that the world disappeared." ~ David Guterson
24. "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
25. "Oh, to be young. To still be one's own hero." ~ David Guterson
26. "The trick was to refuse to allow your pain to prevent you from living honorably. In Japan, she said, a person learned not to complain or be distracted by suffering. To persevere was always a reflection of the state of one's inner life, one's philosophy, and one's perspective. It was best to accept old age, death, injustice, hardship – all of these were part of living" ~ David Guterson
27. "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
28. "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
29. "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
30. "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
31. "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
32. "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
33. "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
34. "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
35. "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
36. "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
37. "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

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The greatest problem about old age is the fear that it may go on too long."
Author: A. J. P. Taylor

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