Top 100 Garth Stein Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 3

51. “I had always wanted to love Eve as Denny loved her, but I never had because I was afraid. She was my rain. She was my unpredictable element. She was my fear. But a racer should not be afraid of the rain; a racer should embrace the rain. I, alone, could manifest a change around me. By changing my mood, my energy, I allowed Eve to regard me differently. And while I cannot say that I am a master of my own destiny, I can say that I have experienced a glimpse of mastery, and I know what I have to work toward.”

— Garth Stein

52. “Just because the light is green doesn’t mean you shouldn’t look both ways before stepping into the street.”

— Garth Stein

53. “With your mind power, your determination, your instinct, and the experience as well, you can fly very high.” –.”

— Garth Stein

54. “Can we not will ourselves to achieve the impossible? Can we not use the power of our life force to change something: one small thing, one insignificant moment, one breath, one gesture? Is there nothing we can do to change what is around us?”

— Garth Stein

55. “So much of language is unspoken. So much of language is compromised of looks and gestures and sounds that are not words. People are ignorant of the vast complexity of their own communication.”

— Garth Stein

56. “I think the one that’s going to be the hardest to make into a film is the one that’s probably going to be made into a film, which is ‘The Art of Racing in the Rain.’ I mean, it’s narrated by a dog. How do you do that? But hopefully we’ll get to see.”

— Garth Stein

57. “People, like dogs, love repetition. Chasing a ball, lapping a course in a race car, sliding down a slide. Because as much as each incident is similar, so it is different.”

— Garth Stein

58. “In Seattle we live among the trees and the waterways, and we feel we are rocked gently in the cradle of life. Our winters are not cold and our summers are not hot and we congratulate ourselves for choosing such a spectacular place to rest our heads.”

— Garth Stein

59. “Many of us have convinced ourselves that compromise is necessary to achieve our goals, that all of our goals are not attainable so we should eliminate the extraneous, prioritize our desires, and accept less than the moon.”

— Garth Stein

60. “So how does a person believe?” I asked. “By seeing the beauty in everything. By seeing the potential in every moment. God created all things, Trevor. God loves all things. When you love all things as well, you will find your happiness.”

— Garth Stein

61. “People speak of a will to live. They rarely speak of a will to die. Because people are afraid of death. Death is dark and unknown and frightening. But not for me. It is not the end.”

— Garth Stein

62. “And I wonder: Have I squandered my dogness? Have I forsaken my nature for my desires? Have I made a mistake by anticipating my future and shunning my present?”

— Garth Stein

63. “I have made mistakes and I have hurt people, I do not deny that fact. But I have corrected those mistakes vigorously once I understood the error of my ways.”

— Garth Stein

64. “I could have grabbed his shirt collar. I could have pulled him close to me, so close he could feel my breath on his skin, and I could have said to him, “This is just a crisis. A flash! A single match struck against the implacable darkness of time! You are the one who taught me to never give up. You taught me that new possibilities emerge for those who are prepared, for those who are ready. You have to believe!”

— Garth Stein

65. “People and their rituals. They cling to things so hard sometimes.”

— Garth Stein

66. “I know in this time of great technological advancement, the idea of reading a book seems almost anachronistic, but I think it’s worth preserving.”

— Garth Stein

67. “Perhaps that’s what life is about – the search for such a connection. The search for magic. The search for the inexplicable. Not in order to explain it, or contain it. Simply in order to feel it. Because in that recognition of the sublime, we see for a moment the entire universe in the palm of our hand. And in that moment, we touch the face of God.”

— Garth Stein

68. “Anyone who has a dog knows that they have some very deep thoughts, that they have moods and emotions, they get their feelings hurt. It’s not a far reach to give them opinions and values and long-term desires.”

— Garth Stein

69. “Hands are the windows to a man’s soul.”

— Garth Stein

70. “The rain has been incessant. It feeds my soul. I feel that it washes over my body, and a part of me drips into the soil with the rain, and a part of me becomes the soil and is drank into the roots of these trees and I have become one with them.”

— Garth Stein

71. “He is so brilliant. He shines. He’s beautiful with his hands that grab things and his tongue that says things and the way he stands and chews his food for so long, mashing it into a paste before he swallows.”

— Garth Stein

72. “Rain amplifies your mistakes, and water on the track can make your car handle unpredictably. When something unpredictable happens you have to react to it; if you’re reacting at speed, you’re reacting too late. And so you should be afraid.”

— Garth Stein

73. “A winner, a champion, will accept his fate. He will continue with his wheels in the dirt. He will do his best to maintain his line and gradually get himself back on the track when it is safe to do so. Yes, he loses a few places in the race. Yes, he is at a disadvantage. But he is still racing. He is still alive. The.”

— Garth Stein

74. “We had come so close to greatness. We had smelled it, and it smelled like roast pig. Everybody likes the smell of roast pig. But what is worse, smelling the roast and not feasting, or not smelling the roast at all?”

— Garth Stein

75. “Llorar ayuda porque lava el dolor.”

— Garth Stein

76. “Try to imprint what I know on my soul, a thing that has no surface, no sides, no pages, no form of any kind.”

— Garth Stein

77. “Oh, my faith has flagged at times. It’s easy to fall back into the same routines and paint over the sublime with coat after coat of indifference... I promise you something: when you have touched the face of God, you can never unlearn what you have learned. You can never unsee what you have seen.”

— Garth Stein

78. “My intent, here, is to tell our story in a dramatically truthful way. While the facts may be less than accurate, please understand that the emotion is true. The intent is true. And, dramatically speaking, intention is everything.”

— Garth Stein

79. “What can I do but force myself to remember? Try to imprint what I know on my soul, a thing that has no surface, no sides, no pages, no form of any kind. Carry it so deeply in the pockets of my existence that when I open my eyes and look down at my new hands with their thumbs that are able to close tightly around their fingers, I will already know. I will already see.”

— Garth Stein

80. “Because the earth calls. The soil, the rocks, the clay. It calls to us to remind us, to make sure we remember. The earth will ultimately win. It always does. We will, all of us, end our lives here. Even the birds.”

— Garth Stein

81. “But that day I was anxious. I was nervous and worried, uneasy and distracted. I paced around and never felt settled. I didn’t care for the sensation, yet I realized it was possibly a natural progression of my evolving soul, and therefore I tried my best to embrace it.”

— Garth Stein

82. “I hear hundreds of years of life. I hear wind and rain and fire and beetles. I hear the seasons changing and birds and squirrels. I hear the life of the trees this wood came from.”

— Garth Stein

83. “When I return to the world, I will be a man. I will walk among you. I will lick my lips with my small, dexterous tongue. I will shake hands with other men, grasping firmly with my opposable thumbs. And I will teach all people that I know. And when I see a man or a woman or a child in trouble, I will extend my hand, both metaphorically and physically. I will offer my hand. To him. To her. To you. To the world. I will be a good citizen, a good partner in the endeavour of life that we all share.”

— Garth Stein

84. “Inside each of us resides the truth, the absolute truth. But sometimes the truth is hidden in a hall of mirrors. Sometimes we believe we are viewing the read thing, when in fact we are viewing a facsimile, a distortion... We too, must shatter the mirrors. We must look into ourselves and root out the distortions until that thing which we know in our hearts is perfect and true, stands before us. Only then will justice be served.”

— Garth Stein

85. “You know, he said, at some point you’re going to realize that being a smart-ass isn’t about being smart as it is about being an ass.”

— Garth Stein

86. “The first time I saw you,′ he says, ‘I knew we belonged together.”

— Garth Stein

87. “Eve continued with the inexorable process of dying, Zoe spent too much time with her grandparents, and Denny and I worked at slowing the beating of our hearts so we wouldn’t feel so much pain.”

— Garth Stein

88. “Faster, the wind presses against my face as I run, faster, I feel my heart beating wildly and I bark twice to tell him, to tell everyone in the world, to say faster! I bark twice so he knows, so he remembers. What I want now is what I’ve always wanted. One more lap, Denny! One more lap! Faster!”

— Garth Stein

89. “What I want now is what I’ve always wanted.”

— Garth Stein

90. “People, if you pay attention to them, change the direction of one another’s conversations constantly. It’s like having a passenger in your car who suddenly grabs the steering wheel and turns you down a side street.”

— Garth Stein

91. “Gestures are all that I have; sometimes they must be grand in nature. And while I occasionally step over the line and into the world of the melodramatic, it is what I must do in order to communicate clearly and effectively. In order to make my point understood without question.”

— Garth Stein

92. “So what if man’s body evolved from the monkeys? Whether he came from monkeys or fish is unimportant. The important idea is that when the body became “human” enough, the first human soul slipped into it.”

— Garth Stein

93. “One’s nature comes from within, not from without. The abomination occurs in subverting one’s instinct in favor of a rigid code written by others. Trying to force yourself into a role that confounds your spirit will always break you.”

— Garth Stein

94. “Stories continue in all directions to include even the retelling of the stories themselves, as legend is informed by interpretation, and interpretation is informed by time.”

— Garth Stein

95. “When I am racing, my mind and my body are working so quickly and so well together, I must be sure no to think, or else I will definitely make a mistake.”

— Garth Stein

96. “Intention is everything.”

— Garth Stein

97. “With a book – presuming it’s a good book – you can depend upon an outcome that adheres to the necessities of drama. The question will be answered. It has to be. The answer may not be happy; we can’t guarantee a comedy. Sometimes tragedy strikes. But there will be a conclusion. Of that we can be sure. That’s the whole point of a book. But in real life, there is no guarantee that any question will ever be answered. Real life is messy because we don’t know where it’s going to go.”

— Garth Stein

98. “We are all afforded our physical existence so we can learn about ourselves.”

— Garth Stein

99. “Terriers are problem solvers. They’ll do what you tell them, but only if it happens to be in line with what they wanted to do anyway.”

— Garth Stein

100. “And it is clear to Evan, now: the difference between what is and what has been done; the present and the past. He sees that what he does and who he is isn’t based on the past unless he wants it to be... No. That is the past, which has been seen differently through many different eyes and has become hazy and unclear, like a pond when stirred with a stick. Only the present moment is clear and free from prejudice.”

— Garth Stein