Russell Banks > Quotes

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“One hates a person for the same reason one loves him ”
― Russell Banks

“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

“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

“We are the planet, fully as much as water, earth, fire and air are the planet, and if the planet survives, it will only be through heroism. Not occasional heroism, a remarkable instance of it here and there, but constant heroism, systematic heroism, heroism as governing principle.”
― Russell Banks, Continental Drift

“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

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

“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

“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

“It was strange to stand there in front of the mirror and see myself like I was my own best friend, a kid wanted to hang with forever. This was a boy I could travel to the seacoasts with, a boy I'd like to meet up with in foreign cities like Calcutta and London and Brazil, a boy I could trust who also had a good sense of humor and liked smoked oysters from a can and good weed and the occasional 40 ounces of malt. If I was going to be alone for the rest of my life this was the person I wanted to be alone with.”
― Russell Banks, Rule of the Bone

“It's like a crime is an act that when you've committed one the act is over and you haven't changed inside. But when you commit a sin it's like you create a condition that you have to live in.”
― Russell Banks, Rule of the Bone

“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

“They were the only three people I'd chosen on my own to love, and they were gone. But still, that morning in Mobay when I saw Russ for the last time, I saw clearly for the first time that loving Sister Rose and I-Man and even Bruce had left me with riches that I could draw on for the rest of my life, I was totally grateful to them.”
― Russell Banks, Rule of the Bone

“They were totally alone, those kids, like each had been accidentally sent to earth from a distant planet to live among adult humans and be dependent on them for everything because compared to the adult humans they were extremely fragile creatures and didn't know the language or how anything here worked and hadn't arrived with any money. And because they were like forbidden by the humans to use their old language they'd forgotten it so they couldn't be much company or help to each other either. They couldn't even talk about the old days and so pretty soon they forgot there ever were any old days and all there was now was life on earth with adult humans who called them children and acted toward them like they owned them and like they were objects not living creatures with souls.”
― Russell Banks, Rule of the Bone

“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

“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

“Of all the animals on this planet, we are surely the nastiest, the most deceitful, the most murderous and vile. Despite our God, or because of him. Both.”
― Russell Banks, Cloudsplitter

“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

“The metabolic rate of history is too fast for us to observe it. It's as if, attending to the day-long life cycle of a single mayfly, we lose sight of the species and its fate. At the same time, the metabolic rate of geology is too slow for us to perceive it, so that, from birth to death, it seems to us who are caught in the beat of our own individual human hearts that everything happening on this planet is what happens to us, personally, privately, secretly. We can stand at night on a high, cold plain and look out toward the scrabbled, snow-covered mountains in the west, the same in a suburb of Denver as outside a village in Baluchistan in Pakistan, and even though beneath our feet continent-sized chunks of earth grind inexorably against one another, go on driving one or the other continent down so as to rise up and over it, as if desiring to replace it on the map, we poke with our tongue for a piece of meat caught between two back teeth and think of sarcastic remarks we should have made to our brother-in-law at dinner.”
― Russell Banks, Continental Drift

“If you yourself are not a victim, you cannot claim to see the world as the victim does.”
― Russell Banks, Cloudsplitter

“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

“Mourning can be very selfish. When someone you love has died, you tend to recall best those few moments and incidents that helped clarify your sense, not of the person who has died, but of your own self.”
― Russell Banks, The Sweet Hereafter

“I was afraid of the consequences of my acts in the right way, beyond guilt, but it was too late. I'd already become the person I should have been afraid of becoming.”
― Russell Banks, Success Stories: Astute and Forceful Moral Fables of Greed, Violence, and Upward Mobility

“You must not obey a majority, no matter how large, if it opposes your principles and opinions.' He said this to each new volunteer and repeated it over and over to him, until it was engraved on his mind. 'The largest majority is often only an organized mob whose noise can no more change the false into the true than it can change black into white or night into day. And a minority, conscious of its rights, if those rights are based on moral principles, will sooner or later become a just majority.”
― Russell Banks, Cloudsplitter

“Il mondo così com’è continua ad essere se stesso. Si scrivono libri – romanzi, racconti, poesie, infarciti di dettagli che tentano di spiegarci che cos’è il mondo, come se la nostra conoscenza di persone come Bob Dubois e Vanise e Claude Dorsinville servisse ad affrancare gente come loro. Non servirà. Conoscere i fatti della vita e della morte di Bob non cambia nulla nel mondo. Che noi celebriamo la sua vita e piangiamo la sua morte, tuttavia, lo farà. Gioia e lutto per la vita di altri, perfino vite del tutto inventate – anzi, soprattutto quelle –, priverà il mondo di parte dell’ingordigia che gli occorre per continuare ad essere se stesso. Sabotaggio e sovversione, dunque, sono gli obiettivi di questo libro. Va’, mio libro, e contribuisci a distruggere il mondo così com’è.”
― Russel Banks