David Guterson > Quotes

“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: A Novel

“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: A Novel

“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: A Novel

“There are things in this universe that we cannot control, and then there are the things we can. . . . Let fate, coincidence, and accident conspire; human beings must act on reason.”
― David Guterson, Snow Falling on Cedars: A Novel

“That the world was silent and cold and bare and that in this lay its terrible beauty”
― David Guterson, Snow Falling on Cedars: A Novel

“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: A Novel

“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: A Novel

“accident ruled every corner of the universe except the chambers of the human heart.”
― David Guterson, Snow Falling on Cedars: A Novel

“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: A Novel

“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

“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

“Oh, to be young. To still be one's own hero.”
― David Guterson, The Other

“Ben remembered that in Italy, he and Rachel had slipped down between rows of apple trees on the plain of the Po, deep into the cool and dark of orchards, and there they had kissed with the sadness of newlyweds who know that their kisses are too poignantly tender and that their good fortune is subject, like all things, to the crush of time, which remorselessly obliterates what is most desired and pervades all that is beautiful. ”
― David Guterson, East of the Mountains

“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

“Ishmael gave himself to the writing of it, and as he did so he understood this, too: that accident ruled every corner of the universe except the chambers of the human heart.”
― David Guterson, Snow Falling on Cedars: A Novel

“The rain fell with such fervor that the world disappeared.”
― David Guterson, East of the Mountains

“To persevere is always a reflection of the state of one's inner life, one's philosophy and one's perspective”
― David Guterson

“The river of his youth had been diverted and poured out broadly across the land to seep through dirt to the roots of crops instead of running in its bed. The river was no longer a river, and the desert was no longer a desert. Nothing was as it had been.
He knew what had happened to the sagelands. He himself had helped burn them. Then men like his father had seized the river without a trace of evil in their hearts, sure of themselves but ignorant, and children of their time entirely, with no other bearings to rely on. Irrigators and fruit-tree growers, they believed the river to be theirs. His own life spanned that time and this, and so he believed in the old fast river as much as he believed in apple orchards, and yet he saw that the two were at odds, the river defeated that apples might grow as far as Royal Slope. It made no more sense to love the river and at the same time kill it growing apples than it made sense to love small birds on the wing and shoot them over pointing dogs. But he'd come into the world in another time, a time immune to these contradictions and in the end he couldn't shake old ways any more than he could shake his name.”
― David Guterson, East of the Mountains

“The trick was to refuse to allow your pain to prevent you from living honorably. In Japan, she said, a person learned not to complain or be distracted by suffering. To persevere was always a reflection of the state of one’s inner life, one’s philosophy, and one’s perspective. It was best to accept old age, death, injustice, hardship – all of these were part of living”
― David Guterson

“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: A Novel