Dean Bakopoulos > Quotes

“Midlife is when you have to accept what you've created, knowing that the life you have is is the only one you'll live. And that can be terrifying, until you accept it, and then you are free of terror.”
― Dean Bakopoulos, Summerlong

“In my classes, we read great fiction obsessively, and then attempt to see how a writer managed to affect us. We try to understand which elements—diction, syntax, point of view and so forth—made us feel that way. After we spend several weeks reading this way, wondering how the author made us shiver like that, we try our own hand. I ask students to begin with ‘green lines,’ to isolate writing so good it makes one writer envious of another. Which parts do they wish they had written themselves? Students start to understand how their own writing works, where it ripples with energy… What they really want is to have some kind of firsthand, visceral relationship with a book—to see what it’s like to take a work apart and put it back together—using great stories as structural models, just the way the kids I grew up with in Detroit fell in love with cars by spending weekends trying to make derelict Ford Mustangs run again. When the engine finally starts, when you figure out how to make it fire, it’s an incredibly powerful learning experience.”
― Dean Bakopoulos

“Then it’s just day by day. And most days are beautiful, Don. It’s regretting yesterday or overthinking tomorrow, that’s when ugliness comes in, right?”
― Dean Bakopoulos, Summerlong: A Novel

“We’re all terrible people. Eventually, we all become terrible, maybe around the middle of our lives, and then, if we’re lucky, we have time to find a way to be good again.”
― Dean Bakopoulos, Summerlong

“There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one. —Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go”
― Dean Bakopoulos, Summerlong: A Novel

“Like an eye, the moon follows us wherever we go.”
― Dean Bakopoulos, Please Don't Come Back from the Moon: A Novel

“They could stay in Iowa. Lots of people do that. Millions of them, like four million of them, stay in Iowa, year after year.”
― Dean Bakopoulos, Summerlong: A Novel

“Inexplicably, I felt a war was coming on, and for many nights I had dreams that I died in battle. I dreamed of mountains that crumbled and rivers that flooded. My dreams were apocalyptic and savage. I began to fear that I was a prophet and that I would soon be called upon to speak. I waited for God's voice.”
― Dean Bakopoulos, Please Don't Come Back from the Moon

“This is what e-mail is: either a cowardly way for people to ask favors of you that they would never ask in person, or a way for people to pretend they are having a friendship with you when they really are not.”
― Dean Bakopoulos, Summerlong: A Novel

“I still have a tendency to sit back and wait out the bad things that try and take over my life.”
― Dean Bakopoulos, Please Don't Come Back from the Moon

“He is on the precipice of cheating, maybe, which in itself is a kind of thrill for him, and yet, if he thinks about it too much he knows it is the same thing. On the precipice or over the precipice, once you’re there, you’re there.”
― Dean Bakopoulos

“Loneliness is a kind of suffering you can alleviate. It’s not something you have to endure, like grief.”
― Dean Bakopoulos

“Our old teachers, our neighbors, our ex-girlfriends, even some of our mothers, I think, began to believe we were without hope. And if you had been with us then, you might have said the same thing. You might have said that we were lost young men too, without goals or courage or aim.
But God, our hopes were high, our visions were glorious and moving. I bet if you could have stepped inside of our squirrelly heads for one minute and seen the impossible futures we were already imagining, well, then your heart would break. You'd weep.”
― Dean Bakopoulos, Please Don't Come Back from the Moon

“—Bon Iver, “Holocene”
― Dean Bakopoulos, Summerlong: A Novel

“hay gold dusk of late spring,”
― Dean Bakopoulos, Summerlong: A Novel

“We almost killed ourselves with rage. We would grow up trampling over things, tearing things down, and people would look at us and wonder why we had such violence in our hearts.”
― Dean Bakopoulos, Please Don't Come Back from the Moon