97 Quotes by Russell Banks

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.

What I am finding now is that my audience is getting younger as I get older, which is a very good thing as you know – you don’t want them to get older as you get older.

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.

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

The received truth of history is shot through and falsified by unknown secrets carried to the grave.

When you have never done a thing before and that thing is not simply and clearly right or wrong, you frequently do not know if it is a cruel thing, you just go ahead and do it. Maybe later you’ll be able to determine whether you acted cruelly. Too late, of course, but at least you’ll know.

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.

One minute he was moving securely through time and space, in perfect coordination with other people; then, with no warning, he was out of step, was somehow removed from everyone else’s sense of time and place, so that the slightest movement, word, facial expression or gesture contained enormous significance. The room filled with coded messages that he could not decode, and he slipped quickly into barely controlled hysteria.

But on the other hand, I don’t actively seek out stories or hunt them down.