Quotes from 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.

Even though I may not intend it when I set out to write the book, these places just emerge as major players in what I'm doing, almost as if they are insisting on it.

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

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.

I often heard about his cases and I often sat in on his trials. In the late 1960s when I was growing up I wanted to be a crusader like him but I didn't want to wear a suit and commute.

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.

Fiction is socially meaningful.

It's a brooding melancholy that haunts me.

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.

I think you have an obligation to share what you know as a writer.

I'm not an urban person.

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.

He decided then that he would love her forever no matter what came to pass. It was not so much a matter of deciding as accepting the inevitability of it.

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.

To acclimate students to misery under the rubric that so doing prepares them for life is a cynical notion—and a horrifying one.

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.

The trick was to live here without hating yourself because all around you was hatred.

The prospect of death in autumn, she said, was irrelevant next to its happy recognition of its participation in the life of the tree itself.

People appeared enormously foolish to him. He understood that they were only animated cavities full of jelly and strings and liquids.

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.

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

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

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

They don't really matter," said Ishmael. "None of those other things make 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.