"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."

6 likes

Source: Interview with Robert I. Birnbaum, www.identitytheory.com. January 18, 2005.

About the author

Russell Banks

Novelist

Russell Banks is an American author known for his deep explorations of identity and truth in novels like 'Cloudsplitter' and 'The Sweet Hereafter'.

All quotes by Russell Banks →

Same author

More quotes by Russell Banks

See all →
Russell Banks Novelist

"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."

Read quote
Russell Banks Novelist

"If you dedicate your attention to discipline in your life you become smarter while you are writing than while you are hanging out with your pals or in any other line of work."

Read quote
Russell Banks Novelist

"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."

Read quote
Russell Banks Novelist

"The 60s passed and faded and I grew older, and in 1987 bought a house in upstate New York, and it turned out that John Brown was buried down the road from my house and that he had lived there longer than anywhere else and his house was still standing."

Read quote
Russell Banks Novelist

"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."

Read quote