Quotes from Garth Stein

Gestures are all that I have.

The first time I saw you," he says, "I knew we belonged together.

Here's why I will be a good person. Because I listen. I cannot speak so I listen very well. I never interrupt, I never deflect the course of the conversation with a comment of my own. People, if you pay attention to them, change the direction of one's conversations constantly. It's like having a passenger in your car who suddenly grabs the steering wheel and turns you down a side street.

I hear hundreds of years of life. I hear wind and rain and fire and beetles. I hear the seasons changing and birds and squirrels. I hear the life of the trees this wood came from.

But I totally understood that what filled us with energy could be irritating to someone else,

You can't know what's going to happen before it happens.

Racers are often called selfish and egotistical. I myself have called race car drivers selfish; I was wrong. To be a champion, you must have no ego at all. You must not exist as a separate entity. You must give yourself over to the race. You are nothing if not for your team, your car, your shoes, your tires. Do not mistake confidence and self-awareness for egotism.

Success at any endeavor on an elite level demands selfishness.

Learn to listen! I beg of you. Pretend you are a dog like me and listen to other people rather than steal their stories.

I knew she had been right about her situation: while doctors are able to help many people, for her, they could only tell her what couldn't be done. And I knew that once they identified her disease for her, once everyone around her accepted her diagnosis and reinforced it and repeated it back to her time and again, there was no way she could stop it. The visible becomes inevitable. Your car goes where your eyes go.

Because the earth calls. The soil, the rocks, the clay. It calls to us to remind us, to make sure we remember. The earth will ultimately win. It always does. We will, all of us, end our lives here. Even the birds.

To live every day as if it had been stolen from death, that is how I want to live. To feel the joy of life, to separate oneself from burden, the angst, the anguish that we encounter every day. To say I am alive, I am wonderful, I am. I am. That is something to aspire to.

Inside each of us resides the truth, the absolute truth. But sometimes the truth is hidden in a hall of mirrors. Sometimes we believe we are viewing the read thing, when in fact we are viewing a facsimile, a distortion...We too, must shatter the mirrors. We must look into ourselves and root out the distortions until that thing which we know in our hearts is perfect and true, stands before us. Only then will justice be served.

You know," he said, "at some point you're going to realize that being a smart-ass isn't as much about being smart as it is about being an ass." "That's good," I said. "Did you read that in a fortune cookie?

Yet for every peak there is a valley.

Sometimes things change, and we have to change, too.

C)hoice without alternative is only a sleight of hand; it is a magician's force-play, during which you believe you have free well, but your fate has already been decided: the magician knows which card you will pick!

With a book—presuming it's a good book—you can depend upon an outcome that adheres to the necessities of drama. The question will be answered. It has to be. The answer may not be happy; we can't guarantee a comedy. Sometimes tragedy strikes. But there will be a conclusion. Of that we can be sure. That's the whole point of a book.

To live every day as if it had been stolen from death, that is how I would like to live. To feel the joy of life, as Eve felt the joy of life. To separate oneself from the burden, the angst, the anguish that we all encounter every day. To say that I am alive, I am wonderful, I am. I am. That is something to aspire to. When I am a person, that is how I will live my life.

Knowing that another path might have been easier for him to travel, but that it couldn't possibly have offered a more satisfying conclusion.

That what you manifest is before you

To remember is to disengage from the present

La soledad es algo que sólo existe en la mente, no fuera de ella, y, que, como un virus, es incapaz de sobrevivir sin un anfitrión que lo acoja.

The true hero is flawed. The true test of a champion is not whether he can triumph, but whether he can overcome obstacles—preferably of his own making—in order to triumph.