Trailerpark Quotes

“When you are a long way from where you think you belong, you will attach yourself to people you would otherwise ignore or even dislike.”
― Russell Banks, Trailerpark

“They knew what he meant, all three of them. They were satisfied that nobody had screwed over him. They knew that even though he was barely twenty years old, Deke understood the world and knew how to live in it.

The band returned to the low stage in front, two middle-aged guitarists with their bellies hanging heavily over gaudy belt buckles and a skinny, balding drummer in his early sixties, all of them wearing matching purple cowboy shirts with pink fringes across their chests and along the backs of their arms.

They started the music again, and Claudel drifted back into his troubles, when all at once, as if entering a room he hadn’t known existed, he realized that while he had been listening to Deke’s story and thinking about it and while he had been watching the youth and attempting to understand him, he hadn’t thought about himself once. Claudel had let young Deke become the center of his thoughts for a few minutes, and his mind and his heart now felt strangely refreshed for it. It was a feeling he couldn’t remember having experienced before. Certainly not since Vietnam. A coherence had momentarily come over his life, and he understood it, knew where it had come from, which gave him a feeling of wholeness he hadn’t even imagined possible before.”
― Russell Banks, Trailerpark

“It was not Merle who had won the $50,000; the trailerpark had won it. Merle had merely represented them in that magical cosmos where anything, absolutely anything, can happen. Of course, it’s probably true that if, on the other hand, what had happened to Merle through no effort on his part had been as colossally, abstractly bad as the $50,000 was good, the residents of the trailerpark would not have felt that it had happened to the community as a whole. If, for example, Merle had been shot in the head by an errant bullet from the gun of a careless deer hunter out of sight in the tamaracks on the far side of the lake, the people in the park would have blamed Merle for having been out there wandering around on the ice during hunting season in the first place. They would have mourned for him, naturally, but his death would be seen forever after as a warning, an admonition. Anyone can be a cause of his or her own destruction, but no one can claim individual responsibility for having created a great good.”
― Russell Banks, Trailerpark

“His father’s philosophy had no place in it for Luck. But the war was teaching Claudel that there were lucky people, like him and the other guys who didn’t get killed or blown half to bits, and there were unlucky people, like all those Vietnamese farmers, say, whose houses and land and children and whole families were getting wiped out for no reason they could name. Half the time they couldn’t even see the bombers that dropped the bombs on them. It was like God was bombing them, instead of some foreigner looking into a bombardier’s sight at 40,000 feet.

Claudel wasn’t stupid, and he could see that the only difference between these farmers and the farmers back home was that one group was unlucky and the other group was lucky.”
― Russell Banks, Trailerpark

“It’s not so much that you will say things when drunk that you’d never say when sober, as much as you will try to say things you’d ordinarily know simply could not be said. It’s your judgment about the sayable that goes, not your inhibitions.”
― Russell Banks, Trailerpark

“Anyone can be a cause of his or her own destruction, but no one can claim individual responsibility for having created a great good.”
― Russell Banks, Trailerpark

“It's hard to know more about a person's life than what that person wants you to know.”
― Russell Banks, Trailerpark