Russell Banks > Quotes

“Loyalty is weird, it kicks in when you dont expect it and the people who deserve loyalty least seem to get it the most.”
― Russell Banks

“If you dedicate your attention to discipline in your life you become smarter while you are writing than while you are hanging out with your pals or in any other line of work.”
― Russell Banks

“Lists of books we re-read and books we can't finish tell more about us than about the relative worth of the books themselves”
― Russell Banks

“They were gone and I missed them but even so I was very happy. For the rest of my life no matter where on this planet earth I went and no matter how scared or confused I got, I could wait until dark and look up into the night sky and see my three friends again and my heart would swell with love of them and make me strong and clearheaded.”
― Russell Banks

“Actually I dont know if it ever works out unless you are standing in the middle of the street and dont see the ten-ton truck coming and this good guy pushes you out of the way and says its for your own good.”
― Russell Banks

“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.”
― Russell Banks, The Angel on the Roof

“Let the truth take care of itself, I decided. It's done all right on its own so far.”
― Russell Banks, The Book of Jamaica

“Go, my book, and help destroy the world as it is.”
― Russell Banks, Continental Drift

“But when you’re a kid it’s like you’re wearing these binoculars strapped to your eyes and you can’t see anything except what’s in the dead center of the lenses”
― Russell Banks, Rule of the Bone

“Boys like it when you talk to them as if they were grown men—at least he always did when he was a kid—because they pretend that’s what they are anyhow, grown-up men, and they do it for their entire lives.”
― Russell Banks, Lost Memory of Skin: A Novel

“The received truth of history is shot through and falsified by unknown secrets carried to the grave.”
― Russell Banks

“One of the most difficult things to say to another person is, I hope that you will love me for no good reason. But it is what we all want and rarely dare to say to one another – to our children, to our parents and mates, to our friends, and to strangers. Especially to strangers, who have neither good nor bad reasons to love us. And it’s why we tell each other stories that we pray will be transformed in the telling by that angel on the roof, made believable and about us all, no matter who we are to one another and who we are not.”
― Russell Banks, The Angel on the Roof

“No, because I am not a ventriloquist. ”
― Russell Banks

“The Cop. She has a steel grid in front of her mind, and for anything in the outer world to reach her it first has to squeeze through the bars of that grid. Information has to be broken into small cubes; information and data packaged in two-dimensional squares are preferable to three-dimensional cubes however: they pass through the grid more quickly and once they reach the Cop’s mind take up less space there.”
― Russell Banks, Lost Memory of Skin: A Novel

“What you believe matters, however. It’s all anyone has to act on. And since what you do is who you are, your actions define you. If you don’t believe anything is true simply because you can’t logically prove what’s true, you won’t do anything. You won’t be anything. You’ll end up spending your life in a rocking chair looking out at the horizon waiting for an answer that never comes. You might as well be dead. It’s an old philosophical problem.”
― Russell Banks, Lost Memory of Skin: A Novel

“my blue eyes peering into their brown eyes and seeing there some essential part of myself, some irreducible aspect of my being, which in turn gave them back the same reflected version of themselves”
― Russell Banks, The Darling

“Public libraries are the sole community centers left in America. The degree to which a branch of the local library is connected to the larger culture is a reflection of the degree to which the community itself is connected to the larger culture.”
― Russell Banks

“I’ve got nothing against outsiders, per se, you understand. It’s just that you have to love a town before you can live in it right, and you have to live in it before you can love it right. Otherwise, you’re a parasite of sorts.”
― Russell Banks, The Sweet Hereafter

“Secrets and lies, they eat your insides until all you have left is a hard thin skin that covers you like the shell of one of those eggs you poke a little hole in and draw out its eggy contents before you dye it for Easter.”
― Russell Banks, Lost Memory of Skin: A Novel

“All those happy, pretty, successful people- he hated them because he knew they didn't really exist, and he hated even more the magazine that glorified them and in a way that made them exist, actors, rock musicians, famous writers, politicians. Those aren't people, he fumed, they're photographs.”
― Russell Banks, Continental Drift

“Our obsession with each other was like the isolation that comes with great pain; it was like extreme sadness. Without our children we might have never discovered our differences, which is what has made our abiding love for each other possible.”
― Russell Banks, The Sweet Hereafter