Top 40 Russell Hoban Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “After all, when you come right down to it, how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language?”

— Russell Hoban

2. “More and more I’m aware that the permutations are not unlimited.”

— Russell Hoban

3. “The things that matter don’t necessarily make sense.”

— Russell Hoban

4. “I’d always assumed I was the central character in my own story, but now it occured to me I might in fact be only a minor character in someone else’s.”

— Russell Hoban

5. “A family is everybody all together.”

— Russell Hoban

6. “But more and more I think that madness is the world’s natural condition and to expect anything else is madness compounded.”

— Russell Hoban

7. “The zoo is a prison for animals who have been sentenced without trial and I feel guilty because I do nothing about it. I wanted to see an oyster-catcher, so I was no better than the people who caged the oyster-catcher for me to see.”

— Russell Hoban

8. “Time’s arrow points one way only. Even the moment just past cannot be returned to.”

— Russell Hoban

9. “Explorers have to be ready to die lost.”

— Russell Hoban

10. “Fidelity is a matter of perception; nobody is unfaithful to the sea or to mountains or to death: once recognized they fill the heart.”

— Russell Hoban

11. “But when I don’t smoke I scarcely feel as if I’m living. I don’t feel as if I’m living unless I’m killing myself.”

— Russell Hoban

12. “And now it seems she’s on my wavelength. That’s all I need. My mind isn’t much of a comfort to me but at least I thought it was private.”

— Russell Hoban

13. “A map is the dead body of where you’ve been. A map is the unborn baby of where you’re going. There are no maps. Maps are pictures of what isn’t.”

— Russell Hoban

14. “Too-lateness, I realized, has nothing to do with age. Too-lateness is potentially every moment. Or not, depending on the person and the moment. Perhaps there even comes a time when it’s no longer too late for anything. Perhaps, even, most times are too early for most things, and most of life has to go by before it’s time for almost anything and too late for almost nothing. Nothing to lose, the present moment to gain, the integration with long-delayed Now.”

— Russell Hoban

15. “Life is a process of one goneness after another.”

— Russell Hoban

16. “Sometimes I think that the biggest difference between men and women is that more men need to seek out some terrible lurking thing in existence and hurl themselves upon it. Women know where it lives but they can let it alone.”

— Russell Hoban

17. “Is there an existence that is only mine?”

— Russell Hoban

18. “Nothing to be done really about animals. Anything you do looks foolish. The answer isn’t in us. It’s almost as if were put here on earth to show how silly they aren’t.”

— Russell Hoban

19. “I have no wisdom and nothing useful to tell you – I only mentioned this because it came into my head.”

— Russell Hoban

20. “If reality had a stage door I’d hang around there to see what comes out after the show.”

— Russell Hoban

21. “There are situations in life to which the only satisfactory response is a physically violent one. If you don’t make that response, you continually relive the unresolved situation over and over in your life.”

— Russell Hoban

22. “Stil it takes you strange walking in your old foot steps like that. Putting your groan up foot where your chyld foot run nor dint know nothing what wer coming.”

— Russell Hoban

23. “Sometimes there’s nothing but Sundays for weeks on end. Why can’t they move Sunday to the middle of the week so you could put it in the OUT tray on your desk?”

— Russell Hoban

24. “Shamans wear bird costumes and they fly. Somehow they experience flying.”

— Russell Hoban

25. “People ask me how I got from St Eustace to Riddley Walker and all I can say is that it’s a matter of being friends with your head. Things come into the mind and wait to hook up with other things; there are places that can heighten your responses, and if you let your head go its own way it might, with luck, make interesting connections. On March 14th, 1974 I got lucky.”

— Russell Hoban

26. “Who can know anybody?′ said the bookshop owner. ‘Every person is like thousands of books. New, reprinting, in stock, out of stock, fiction, non-fiction, poetry, rubbish. The lot. Different every day. One’s lucky to be able to put his hand on the one that’s wanted, let alone know it.”

— Russell Hoban

27. “There must be a lot of people in the world being wondered about by people who don’t see them anymore.”

— Russell Hoban

28. “I believe that most of us would like to be thought well of by horses.”

— Russell Hoban

29. “It’s almost as if we’re put here on earth to show how silly they aren’t.”

— Russell Hoban

30. “I trusted you with the idea of me and you lost it.”

— Russell Hoban

31. “Words have a life; without response they die.”

— Russell Hoban

32. “An idea is an eye given by God for the seeing of God. Some of these eyes we cannot bear to look out of; we blind them as quickly as possible.”

— Russell Hoban

33. “Me, what’s that after all? An arbitrary limitation of being bounded by the people before and after and on either side. Where they leave off I begin, and vice versa.”

— Russell Hoban

34. “He’s taken half of our savings,′ said his mother. ‘If we lived without using the savings before,’ said Boaz-Jachin, ’we can live without the half that he has taken.”

— Russell Hoban

35. “Seeds blow in the wind and what is earf but a deadness with life growing out of it?”

— Russell Hoban

36. “Here below the surface one studies the depths of TO BE, as manifest in AM, IS, and ARE. And if you don’t hold up your end of the conversation I may very well snap you in two.”

— Russell Hoban

37. “O what we ben! And what we come to!”

— Russell Hoban

38. “Am I doomed? Flashing darkness is pretty much the same as flashing light really. Fear isn’t at all the same as courage but after a certain point perhaps being afraid of everything is the same as being afraid of nothing.”

— Russell Hoban

39. “My generation was somewhat between things, neither free nor much supported by whatever held us in.”

— Russell Hoban

40. “We make fiction because we are fiction... It lived us into being and it lives us still.”

— Russell Hoban

41. “The mouse and his child, who had learned so much and had prevailed against such overwhelming odds, never could be persuaded to teach a success course. Popular demand was intense, but they steadfastly refused. The whole secret of the thing, they insisted, was simply and at all costs to move steadily ahead, and that, they said, could not be taught.”

— Russell Hoban

42. “How do you stay cheerful?’ I said. ‘I don’t mind being alive,’ he said.”

— Russell Hoban