Top 70 David Guterson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “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

3. “When it comes time to sit down and write the next book, you’re deathly afraid that you’re not up to the task. That was certainly the case with me after Snow Falling on Cedars.”

— David Guterson

4. “I’m a hypocrite, of course, and I live with that, but I live.”

— David Guterson

5. “Post-modernism is dead because it didn’t address human needs.”

— David Guterson

6. “A literary achievement of the highest order.”

— David Guterson

7. “There’s a certain nostalgia and romance in a place you left.”

— David Guterson

Featured in: Romance Quotes

8. “That the world was silent and cold and bare and that in this lay its terrible beauty.”

— David Guterson

9. “It’s a brooding melancholy that haunts me.”

— David Guterson

10. “The trick was to live here without hating yourself because all around you was hatred. The trick was to refuse to allow your pain to prevent you from living honorably.”

— David Guterson

11. “To persevere is always a reflection of the state of one’s inner life, one’s philosophy and one’s perspective.”

— David Guterson

12. “I know you’ll think this is crazy, but all I want to do is hold you, and I think that if you’ll let me do that just for a few seconds, I can walk away, and never speak to you again.”

— David Guterson

13. “Accident ruled every corner of the universe except the chambers of the human heart.”

— David Guterson

14. “What some people interpret as brooding melancholy is serenity. I don’t feel required to grasp all the time.”

— David Guterson

15. “You 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

16. “The strange thing was, he wanted to like everyone. He just couldn’t find a way to do it.”

— David Guterson

17. “The trick was to live here without hating yourself because all around you was hatred.”

— David Guterson

18. “Tell the truth,′ Nels said. ‘Decide to tell the truth before it’s too late.”

— David Guterson

19. “For them it might stave off what he could not help but see with clarity: that the world was silent and cold and bare and that in this lay its terrible beauty.”

— David Guterson

20. “The status quo was rote memorization and recitation in classrooms thronged with passive children who were sternly disciplined when they expressed individual needs.”

— David Guterson

21. “The prospect of death in autumn, she said, was irrelevant next to its happy recognition of its participation in the life of the tree itself.”

— David Guterson

22. “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

23. “To acclimate students to misery under the rubric that so doing prepares them for life is a cynical notion – and a horrifying one.”

— David Guterson

24. “When I went to college I took a creative writing class and decided in a week to be a writer.”

— David Guterson

25. “He had watched her, after all, mourn her husband’s death and it had been for her in part the discovery that grief could attach itself with permanence – something Ishmael had already discovered. It attached itself and then it burrowed inside and made a nest and stayed. It ate whatever was warm nearby, and then the coldness settled in permanently. You learned to live with it.”

— David Guterson

26. “Oh, to be young. To still be one’s own hero.”

— David Guterson

27. “You’ve been kidding yourself about yourself for so long, you’re someone else. Your you is just a fragile fabrication. Every morning, you have to wake up, assemble this busy, dissembling monster, and get him or her on his or her feet again for another round of fantasy.”

— David Guterson

28. “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

29. “I was born in Washington State and have lived here for 42 plus years.”

— David Guterson

30. “At one level you’re condemned to the voice you have. But within those confines, you have a certain amount of freedom to range among your possible voices.”

— David Guterson

31. “The real question is: How do you react? What do you do next? Evade responsibilities? Bury yourself in work? What do you do? All three of my novels take up that question, although none gives an answer.”

— David Guterson

32. “Don Quixote is one that comes to mind in comparison to mine, in that they both involve journeys undertaken by older men. That is unusual, because generally the hero of a journey story is very young.”

— David Guterson

33. “Cities produce in me melancholy or a tension I don’t need.”

— David Guterson

34. “I’d rather know I can trust you. So before you read what’s in that thing, tell me a story that squares with its details and exonerate yourself in my eyes. Tell me the story you should have told the sheriff right off the bat, when it wasn’t too late, when the truth might still have given you your freedom. When the truth might have done you some good.”

— David Guterson

35. “The world was incomprehensibly intricate, and yet this forest made a simple sense in her heart that she felt nowhere else.”

— David Guterson

36. “It ate at whatever was warm nearby, and then the coldness settled in permanently. You learned to live with it.”

— David Guterson

37. “There were guys who prayed at Tarawa,′ said Ishmael. ‘They still got killed, Mother. Just like the guys who didn’t pray. It didn’t matter either way.”

— David Guterson

38. “I have been trying to think clearly about everything and to use all this distance to advantage. And here is what I’ve discovered. I don’t love you, Ishmael.”

— David Guterson

39. “I became paralyzed as an artist with writer’s block.”

— David Guterson

40. “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

41. “He had seen the insides of jaggedly ripped-open dead people. He knew, for instance, what brains looked like spilling out of somebody’s head. In the context of this, much of what went on in normal life seemed wholly and disturbingly ridiculous.”

— David Guterson

42. “I’m interested in themes that endure from generation to generation.”

— David Guterson

43. “I think you have an obligation to share what you know as a writer.”

— David Guterson

44. “I grew up in Seattle, but I always knew I wanted to leave.”

— David Guterson

45. “Fiction is socially meaningful.”

— David Guterson

46. “Time made me change. I gradually woke up to the realization that this is who I am, an author, a public figure, and I couldn’t just hide in my study, tapping away at the keyboard and pretend that I didn’t have a role to play beyond stringing words together.”

— David Guterson

47. “I have traveled the entire state and spent a lot of time out of doors. So I have known the landscape of the Columbia Basin for quite a while, and I have had this strong feeling about it for many years.”

— David Guterson

Featured in: Strong Quotes

48. “I often heard about his cases and I often sat in on his trials. In the late 1960s when I was growing up I wanted to be a crusader like him but I didn’t want to wear a suit and commute.”

— David Guterson

49. “Hemingway said the only way to write about a place is to leave it.”

— David Guterson

50. “He decided then that he would love her forever no matter what came to pass. It was not so much a matter of deciding as accepting the inevitability of it.”

— David Guterson