Top 50 Russell Banks Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Motivations are too tangled and complex.”

— Russell Banks

2. “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.”

— Russell Banks

3. “There is a wonderful intelligence to the unconscious. It’s always smarter than we are.”

— Russell Banks

4. “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

5. “If you dedicate your attention to discipline in your life you become smarter.”

— Russell Banks

6. “We know that people we love are both good and bad, but we expect strangers to be one or the other.”

— Russell Banks

7. “Our obsession with each other was like the isolation that comes with great pain; it was like extreme sadness. Without our children we might have never discovered our differences, which is what has made our abiding love for each other possible.”

— Russell Banks

8. “Nobody does anything for one reason.”

— Russell Banks

9. “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

10. “Luck can’t last a lifetime unless you die young.”

— Russell Banks

11. “John Brown first swam into my vision in the 1960s when I was a political activist in the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement at Chapel Hill, where I went to university.”

— Russell Banks

12. “No, because I am not a ventriloquist.”

— Russell Banks

13. “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

14. “First of all it’s usually women who run these higher primate sanctuaries, rarely men. They are white. They come from privileged backgrounds. They are educated.”

— Russell Banks

15. “It’s a way of living with tragedy, I guess, to claim after it happens that you saw it coming, as if somehow you had already made the necessary adjustments beforehand.”

— Russell Banks

16. “It’s hard to spend years at a time working in total solitude with no reality-check.”

— Russell Banks

17. “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

18. “It’s hard to know more about a person’s life than what that person wants you to know.”

— Russell Banks

19. “Because it’s anger that drives us and delivers us. It’s not any kind of love either-love for the underdog or the victim, or whatever you want to call them. Some litigators like to claim that. The losers.”

— Russell Banks

20. “Let the truth take care of itself, I decided. It’s done all right on its own so far.”

— Russell Banks

21. “The United States particularly abandoned Liberia after the end of the Cold War.”

— Russell Banks

22. “One minute he was moving securely through time and space, in perfect coordination with other people; then, with no warning, he was out of step, was somehow removed from everyone else’s sense of time and place, so that the slightest movement, word, facial expression or gesture contained enormous significance. The room filled with coded messages that he could not decode, and he slipped quickly into barely controlled hysteria.”

— Russell Banks

23. “It’s a landscape that controls you, sits you down and says, Shut up, pal, I’m in charge here.”

— Russell Banks

24. “And there are people who want to be writers because they love to write. And they care.”

— Russell Banks

25. “I’ve got nothing against outsiders, per se, you understand. It’s just that you have to love a town before you can live in it right, and you have to live in it before you can love it right. Otherwise, you’re a parasite of sorts.”

— Russell Banks

26. “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

27. “He can’t quite picture God except as a huge ball of light with an old man’s deep voice like in the pickup truck ads on TV coming out of the ball of light dictating the way everything in Eden is supposed to work.”

— Russell Banks

28. “It was like a dream, a beautiful, soothing dream of late autumn: low, gray skies, smell of woodsmoke, fallen leaves crackling beneath my feet, and somewhere out there, in the farmsteads and plantations ahead of me, swift retribution! Freedom! The bloody work of the Lord!”

— Russell Banks

29. “The best thing about writing programs is that it rationalized the apprenticeship of a writer.”

— Russell Banks

30. “Father argued that society as a whole must come to be organized on a different basis than greed, for while material interests gained somewhat by the institutionalized deification of pure selfishness, ordinary men and women lost everything by it.”

— Russell Banks

31. “But really, it was reading that led me to writing. And in particular, reading the American classics like Twain who taught me at an early age that ordinary lives of ordinary people can be made into high art.”

— Russell Banks

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32. “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.”

— Russell Banks

33. “Much more than memoir; it’s history.”

— Russell Banks

34. “Chimpanzees are endangered. Severely.”

— Russell Banks

35. “But on the other hand, I don’t actively seek out stories or hunt them down.”

— Russell Banks

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

36. “For instance, a man generally doesn’t even know how small a woman is until he holds an article of her clothing up in front of him, one of her nightgowns, say, and sees how small and flimsy it is and how like a child’s and unlike his own, and how thick and heavy his hands seem.”

— Russell Banks

37. “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

38. “We pass between sea and sky with unaccountable, humiliating ease, as if there were no firmament between the firmaments, no above or below, here or there, now or then, with only the feeble conventions of language, our contrived principles, and our love of one another’s light to keep our own light from going out; abandon any one of them, and we dissolve in darkness like salt in water.”

— Russell Banks

39. “What I am finding now is that my audience is getting younger as I get older, which is a very good thing as you know – you don’t want them to get older as you get older.”

— Russell Banks

40. “If you yourself are not a victim, you cannot claim to see the world as the victim does.”

— Russell Banks

41. “One hates a person for the same reason one loves him.”

— Russell Banks

42. “A couple of years I taught in graduate programs at NYU and Columbia, in the early eighties.”

— Russell Banks

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

— Russell Banks

44. “I kept driving straight on toward what we called home and could not say aloud the words that were thrashing me, as if somehow by remaining silent I could keep the terrible thing from having occurred.”

— Russell Banks

45. “Although I still occasionally paint and draw, my life has now been shaped by my writing.”

— Russell Banks

46. “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

47. “Photographs of them alive and smiling would have made me cry and fall down and beat the earth with my fists; their actual dead faces only sealed me off from myself.”

— Russell Banks

48. “Our sins describe us, and our prohibitions describe our sins.”

— Russell Banks

49. “The only way I could go on living was to believe I was not living.”

— Russell Banks

50. “And out of a desire essentially to imitate what I was reading, I began to write, like a clever monkey.”

— Russell Banks

Featured in: Reading Quotes