113 Quotes by David Guterson

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...

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 had seen the insides of jaggedly ripped-open dead people. He knew, for instance, what brains looked like spilling out of somebody’s head. In the context of this, much of what went on in normal life seemed wholly and disturbingly ridiculous.

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.

Tell the truth,′ Nels said. ‘Decide to tell the truth before it’s too late.

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.

He had watched her, after all, mourn her husband’s death and it had been for her in part the discovery that grief could attach itself with permanence – something Ishmael had already discovered. It attached itself and then it burrowed inside and made a nest and stayed. It ate whatever was warm nearby, and then the coldness settled in permanently. You learned to live with it.

Cities produce in me melancholy or a tension I don’t need.

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.