Quotes from Stuart Dybek

Our plans for the future made us laugh and feel close, but those same plans somehow made anything more than temporary between us seem impossible. It was the first time I'd ever had the feeling of missing someone I was still with.

The public library is where place and possibility meet.

Love, it's such a night, laced with running water, irreparable, riddled with a million leaks. A night shaped like a shadow thrown by your absence. Every crack trickles, every overhang drips. The screech of nighthawks has been replaced by the splash of rain. The rain falls from the height of streetlights. Each drop contains its own shattering blue bulb.

Sometimes, in a tight game with runners on, digging in at short, ready to break with the ball, a peace I'd never felt before would paralyze the diamond. For a moment of eternal stillness I felt as if I were cocked at the very heart of the Midwest.

I had this sudden awareness,' she continues, 'of how the moments of our lives go out of existence before we're conscious of having lived them. It's only a relatively few moments that we get to keep and carry with us for the rest of our lives. Those moments are our lives. Or maybe it's more like those moments are the dots in what we call our lives, or the lines we draw between them, connecting them into imaginary pictures of ourselves.

I recalled the afternoon when the two of us stood beating erasers, and Camille confided that she'd done penance for stories - stories that I'll never know if she wrote or only imagined writing. She'd wanted me to tell her a secret from my dreams, a secret from my dreams I hadn't had as yet, and so I didn't quite understand what she was after. It's about feeling, Camille had insisted. I didn't understand then that she was talking about risk.

What art does is give us the refinement, all the shades of meaning, of emoting, that we don't have language for. What fascinates me about that is we're talking about an art form in which your medium is language. It's almost a paradox that you're seeing. I want to give you emotion, that if I just relied on diction, I wouldn't have language for it.

No matter how often he strips the past from her body, she finds a way to wear it again.

The sound of dogs howling from the next homestead over. But the space between our houses grows while I sleep. The forest around me deepens. The trees fall in love and multiply. The snow an intoxicant. I pray the pines don't get bolder, that they don't grow organs and hands.

Night doesn't fall, but rather, all the disregarded shadows of a day flock like blackbirds, and suddenly rise. — Stuart Dybek, from "Ravenswood," Alaska Quarterly Review , Fall & Winter 2012

Most men complimented my sexual vigor, thinking I owed it to them. All of them credited themselves afterwards, but the dour clown just lay there. For a moment, I thought I loved him.

A crowd of tourists were standing in the laundry room. They were speaking languages.

Rob was lying just beyond the edge of the shadows thrown by her eyelashes.

What chance did words have beside the distraction of her body?

Rather than feeling that every moment you've got to exert this enormous control, you can take the attitude that your job as a writer is not to control everything, but to set things in motion.

In high school the priests had cautioned us against the danger of books. "The wrong ones will warp your mind more than it already is, Marzek". I tried to find out what the wrong ones were so that I could read them. I had already developed my basic principle of Catholic education-The Double Reverse: (1) suspect what they teach you, (2) study what they condemn

Rather than feeling that every moment you've got to exert this enormous control, you can take the attitude that your job as a writer is not to control everything, but to set things in motion.