David Guterson Quotes - Page 2

The status quo was rote memorization and recitation in classrooms thronged with passive children who were sternly disciplined when they expressed individual needs.

I became paralyzed as an artist with writer's block.

There's a certain nostalgia and romance in a place you left.

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

I was aware that there is an expectation that writers inevitably falter at this stage, that they fail to live up to the promise of their first successful book, that the next book never pleases the way the prior one did. It simply increased my sense of being challenged.

Writing became an obsessive compulsive habit but I had almost no money so I thought about being an urban firefighter and having lots of free time in which to write or becoming an English teacher and thinking about books and writers on a daily basis. That swayed me.

He decided then that he would love her forever no matter what came to pass. It was not so much a matter of deciding as accepting the inevitability of it. It made him feel better, though he felt perturbed, too, worried that this kiss was wrong. But from his point of view, at fourteen years old, their love was entirely unavoidable. It had started on the day they'd clung to his glass box and kissed in the sea, and now it must go on forever. He felt certain of this.

That the world was silent and cold and bare and that in this lay its terrible beauty

To deny that there was this dark side of life would be like pretending that the cold of winter was somehow only a temporary illusion, a way station on the way to the higher "reality" of long, warm, pleasant summers. But summer, it turned out, was no more real than the snow that melted in wintertime.

What sustains me is to be with my family and to write.

A literary achievement of the highest order.

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.

My father is a practicing criminal law attorney in the Seattle area.

I grew up in Seattle, but I always knew I wanted to leave.

It's a brooding melancholy that haunts me.

My book is traditional. It runs counter to the post-modern spirit.

The real question is: How do you react? What do you do next? Evade responsibilities? Bury yourself in work? What do you do? All three of my novels take up that question, although none gives an answer.

I have traveled the entire state and spent a lot of time out of doors. So I have known the landscape of the Columbia Basin for quite a while, and I have had this strong feeling about it for many years.

I often heard about his cases and I often sat in on his trials. In the late 1960s when I was growing up I wanted to be a crusader like him but I didn't want to wear a suit and commute.

We should recognize that schools will never solve the bedrock problems of education because the problems are problems of families, of cultural pressures that the schools reflect and thus cannot really remedy.

Post-modernism is dead because it didn't address human needs.

I'm not an urban person.

I was born in Washington State and have lived here for 42 plus years.

I think of myself as a really happy person.

You should learn to say nothing that will cause you regret. You should not say what is not in your heart - or what is only in your heart for a moment. But you know this - silence is better.