Quote

Driving home, it's all I can do to keep from crying. Time's come, time's gone, time's never returning, I say to myself. What's here in front of me is all I've got, I decide, and as I drive my car through the blowing snow it doesn't seem like much, except for the kindness that I've just exchanged with an old lady, so I concentrate on that.

Russell Banks

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Russell Banks
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: March 28
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Newton
Massachusetts
Home
Fronts
Lady
Come
Front
Snow
Much
Except
Decide
Never
Seem
Driving
Exchanged
Time
Gone
Drive
Returning
Like
Keep
Cry
Blowing
Doesn
Kindness
Concentrate
Seems
Car
Crying

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Lists of books we reread and books we can't finish tell more about us than about the relative worth of the books themselves.
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Our sins describe us, and our prohibitions describe our sins.
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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.
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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.
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One hates a person for the same reason one loves him
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There is a wonderful intelligence to the unconscious. It’s always smarter than we are.
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Storytelling is an ancient and honorable act. An essential role to play in the community or tribe. It's one that I embrace wholeheartedly and have been fortunate enough to be rewarded for.
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One of the things I have tried to do with this book and with all of them really is avoid that simple, easy, reductionist view of motivation and to show we do things for a complex net of reasons, a real braid of reasons.
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I much prefer working with kids whose life could be completely upended by a reading of a book over a weekend. You give them a book to read - they go home and come back a changed person. And that is so much more interesting and exciting.
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The United States particularly abandoned Liberia after the end of the Cold War.
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It's hard to spend years at a time working in total solitude with no reality-check.
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Loyalty is weird, it kicks in when you dont expect it and the people who deserve loyalty least seem to get it the most.
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Although I still occasionally paint and draw, my life has now been shaped by my writing.
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For almost anyone who chooses to be a writer, since so very few writers are able to learn a living from their work that is equivalent to the living earned by the average dentist or accountant.
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The issue of torture, connected to American soldiers, is not somewhere most people want to linger. We may not want to confront this issue so much in the U.S. because of how we want to think about our veterans. There's the sense that we want to think of our veterans as - if they're damaged, damaged by something glamorous, like a firefight.
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Luck can't last a lifetime unless you die young.
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Motivations are too tangled and complex.
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The best thing about writing programs is that it rationalized the apprenticeship of a writer.
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And there are people who want to be writers because they love to write. And they care.
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A couple of years I taught in graduate programs at NYU and Columbia, in the early eighties.
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