Quotes from Russell Banks

Florida from its beginnings has served as a catch basin for the world's detritus.

He said, Yeah, well, artists are a lot like gangsters. They both know that the official version, the one everyone else believes, is a lie.

Biology doesn't matter, the Christians argued, because this body we live in is not ultimately real; history doesn't matter, they said, because God's time is different and superior to man's anyhow; and forget cause and effect, forget what you've been told about the physical world, because there is heaven and there is hell and there is this green earth in between, and you are always alive in one of the three places.

From then on, we were simply different people. Not new people; different.

He can take it and leave it, which is a much happier condition than having to do one or the other. He's not sure how this

Other people were in one world; he was in a second. And the distance between their worlds caused other concern and perplexity made them curious about him -- for here he was alone in his world; and there they were gathered together in theirs.

Angry? Yes, I'm angry: I'd be a lousy lawyer if I weren't.

By this evening," he declared, "we will all know who we are and what we're doing here!

Listen, identify withe the victims and you become one yourself. Victims make lousy litigators.

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. It felt like a precious diamond and I was holding it up to the sunlight between my thumb and forefinger and all these cold blue and white and gold colored sparks of light were jumping off of it.

Plus when you get down to important moments in life like this your upbringing always seems to kick into over-drive no matter what religion or philosophy you happen to prefer as an adult or as an older kid like me. In a crunch us Christians like to think God even sets the price of airline tickets.

Anyone can be a cause of his or her own destruction, but no one can claim individual responsibility for having created a great good.

We all lose our innocence soon enough; it's inescapable. Most of us aren't emotionally or intellectually ready for it until our thirties or even later, however, so when one loses it prematurely, in childhood and adolescence, through divorce or the sudden early death of a parent, it can leave one fixated on that loss for a lifetime. Because it's premature, it feels unnatural, violent and unnecessary, a permanent, gratuitous wounding, and it leaves one angry at the world

I'm thinking, Bone, man, wherever you were before you're on the other side now.

Florida from its beginnings has served as a catch basin for the world's detritus. It's where you go when your prospects elsewhere have ended, and you've not yet settled into despair, and you still think there's a slight chance you can start over, and no one will notice your previous failings or hold them against you while you gather your bearings and begin again.

Frank was silent for a moment. He said, "It's supposed to snow this weekend, according to the Channel Five guy, Tom Messner.

A tattoo does that, it makes you think about your body like it's this special suit that you can put on or take off whenever you want and a new name if it's cool enough does the same thing. To have both at once is power. It's the kind of power as all those superheroes who have secret identities get from being able to change back and forth from one person into another. No matter who you think he is, man, the dude is always somebody else.

That's why his hands were trembling as he lighted another cigarette. He was about to bump up against and break through an invisible membrane between the perfectly controlled world locked inside his head and the endlessly overflowing unpredictable, dangerous world outside.

A dog-it was a dog I saw for certain. Or thought I saw. It was snowing pretty hard by then, and you can see things in the snow that aren't there, or aren't exactly there, so that by God when you do see something, you react anyhow, erring on the distaff side, if you get my drift. That's my training as a driver, but it's also my temperament as a mother of two grown sons and wife to an invalid, and that way when I'm wrong at least I'm wrong on the side of the angels.

The wind is shifting gradually around to the north and the rain has intensified. It's nearly dawn when he crosses the state line into Alabama, and finally it enters his mind that a hurricane has come in off the Gulf and he has been driving straight through it for the last several hours.

I'm the kind of person who always follows the manual. No shortcuts.

Fixing motives is like fixing blame-the further away from the act you get, the harder it is to single out one thing as having caused it.

Obviously, you can't control everything, but you are obliged to take care of the few things you can. I'm an optimist, basically, who acts like a pessimist. On principle. Just in case.

Thus, until we have truly become a democracy, every American, white as much as black, red, or yellow, lives not in his skin but on it. If one person is called colored, let all be colored.