"None of those other things makes a difference. Love is the strongest thing in the world, you know. Nothing can touch it. Nothing comes close. If we love each other we're safe from it all. Love is the biggest thing there is."
— David Guterson (Snow Falling on Cedars)

"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..."
— David Guterson (Snow Falling on Cedars)

"As soon as he was gone, we opened, "Baucis and Philemon." An elderly couple living in a cottage, they're granted a wish by Jove. They confer in private before Philemon asks, "May one hour take us both away; let neither outlive the other." The wish is granted.

I said, "Simultaneous deaths? Why didn't they wish for eternal happiness instead? What else would anyone wish for?"

"They did wish for that," answered Jamie."
— David Guterson (The Other)

"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."
— David Guterson (Snow Falling on Cedars)

"The snowfall obliterated the borders between the fields and made Kabuo Miyamoto's long-cherished seven acres indistinguishable from the land that surrounded them. All human claims to the landscape were superseded, made null and void by the snow. The world was one world, and the notion that a man might kill another over some small patch of it did not make sense..."
— David Guterson

"The world was incomprehensibly intricate, and yet this forest made a simple sense in her heart that she felt nowhere else.

[S]he wanted only her own strawberry farm, the fragrance of the fields and the cedar trees, and to live simply in this place forever.

[S]he had fallen into loving him long before she knew herself, though it occurred to her now that she might never know herself, that perhaps no one ever does, that such a thing might not be possible.

[Y]ou 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."
— David Guterson (Snow Falling on Cedars)

"The strange thing was, he wanted to like everyone. He just couldn't find a way to do it."
— David Guterson (Snow Falling on Cedars)

"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."
— David Guterson (Snow Falling on Cedars)

"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."
— David Guterson (Snow Falling on Cedars)

"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. "
— David Guterson (The Other)