Quotes from David Guterson

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

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

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.

The world was incomprehensibly intricate, and yet this forest made a simple sense in her heart that she felt nowhere else.

I was totally absorbed in the real world, the politics, the history, the news, and I just couldn't find my way into the fictional world... When I finally could return to writing the novel, it was in fits and starts.

Writing became an obsessive compulsive habit but I had almost no money so I thought about being an urban firefighter and having lots of free time in which to write or becoming an English teacher and thinking about books and writers on a daily basis. That swayed me.

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

Accident ruled every corner of the universe except the chambers of the human heart.

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.

I know you'll think this is crazy, but all I want to do is hold you, and I think that if you'll let me do that just for a few seconds, I can walk away, and never speak to you again.

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.

There are things in this universe that we cannot control, and then there are the things we can. . . . Let fate, coincidence, and accident conspire; human beings must act on reason.

The strange thing was, he wanted to like everyone. He just couldn't find a way to do it.

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

Ishmael gave himself to the writing of it, and as he did so he understood this, too: that accident ruled every corner of the universe except the chambers of the human heart.

The rain fell with such fervor that the world disappeared.

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...

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.

Oh, to be young. To still be one's own hero.

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.

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

Ben remembered that in Italy, he and Rachel had slipped down between rows of apple trees on the plain of the Po, deep into the cool and dark of orchards, and there they had kissed with the sadness of newlyweds who know that their kisses are too poignantly tender and that their good fortune is subject, like all things, to the crush of time, which remorselessly obliterates what is most desired and pervades all that is beautiful.

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.

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.