Quotes from Russell Banks

No, because I am not a ventriloquist.

Our sins describe us, and our prohibitions describe our sins.

He can't quite picture God except as a huge ball of light with an old man's deep voice like in the pickup truck ads on TV coming out of the ball of light dictating the way everything in Eden is supposed to work.

It's coming to seem the only way to avoid hurting other people, which in his experience is what gives them power over you.

I could no longer believe even in life. Which meant that I had come to be the reverse, the opposite of a Christian. For me, now, the only reality is death.

I remember thinking you live from moment to moment and the moments all flow into one another forwards and backwards and you almost never catch one like this that's separate from the rest.

Because it's anger that drives us and delivers us. It's not any kind of love either-love for the underdog or the victim, or whatever you want to call them. Some litigators like to claim that. The losers.

It's a landscape that controls you, sits you down and says, Shut up, pal, I'm in charge here.

In some countries, I said to myself, the only life you can properly desire is that of destroyer.

I kept driving straight on toward what we called home and could not say aloud the words that were thrashing me, as if somehow by remaining silent I could keep the terrible thing from having occurred.

We pass between sea and sky with unaccountable, humiliating ease, as if there were no firmament between the firmaments, no above or below, here or there, now or then, with only the feeble conventions of language, our contrived principles, and our love of one another's light to keep our own light from going out; abandon any one of them, and we dissolve in darkness like salt in water.

Photographs of them alive and smiling would have made me cry and fall down and beat the earth with my fists; their actual dead faces only sealed me off from myself.

Father took race to be the central and inescapable fact of American life and character, and thus he did not apologize for its being the central fact of his own life and character.

The only way I could go on living was to believe I was not living.

tall gray-faced black woman in her thirties

it is we who live for the dead and not the dead who live for us.

It's hard to know more about a person's life than what that person wants you to know.

We all have our little secrets, no? And we all tell little lies, sometimes for innocent reasons. To make friends, for instance, or to avoid embarrassment. Or just to keep things simple. Sometimes the truth is too complicated to pass along in a short conversation or interview. And sometimes it's just irrelevant.

Since my adolescence I have read two and sometimes three newspapers a day, frequently clipping an article that for obscure and soon forgotten reasons attracts me. I usually toss the clippings into a desk drawer, and later, often years later, I'll find myself reading through the clippings, throwing most of them out. It fills me with a strange sadness, a kind of grief for my lost self, as if I were reading and throwing out old diaries.

a fully flowered narcissist.

The Cop. She has a steel grid in front of her mind, and for anything in the outer world to reach her it first has to squeeze through the bars of that grid. Information has to be broken into small cubes; information and data packaged in two-dimensional squares are preferable to three-dimensional cubes however: they pass through the grid more quickly and once they reach the Cop's mind take up less space there.

By homely gift and hindered Words The human heart is told Of Nothing— "Nothing" is the force That renovates the World— Emily Dickinson (#1563)

Anyone with a lifelong guilty conscience is likely to be a hair-splitting moralist, especially when it comes to other people's behavior.

I thought that if could bring back the memory, I could bring back the feeling, and I would know for the first time what I truly wanted for myself, and then I would go and find it. That was my plan. But memories are always of things lost and gone and never returning.