Loyalty is weird, it kicks in when you don’t expect it, and the people who deserve loyalty least seem to get it the most.
—Russell Banks
If you yourself are not a victim, you cannot claim to see the world as the victim does.
—Russell Banks
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
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
We all have our little secrets, no? And we all tell little lies, sometimes for innocent reasons. To make friends, for instance, or to avoid embarrassment. Or just to keep things simple. Sometimes the truth is too complicated to pass along in a short conversation or interview. And sometimes it’s just irrelevant.
—Russell Banks
Of all the animals on this planet, we are surely the nastiest, the most deceitful, the most murderous and vile. Despite our God, or because of him. Both.
—Russell Banks
Our sins describe us, and our prohibitions describe our sins.
—Russell Banks
I remember thinking you live from moment to moment, and the moments all flow into one another forwards and backwards, and you almost never catch one like this that’s separate from the rest.
—Russell Banks
One hates a person for the same reason one loves him.
—Russell Banks
It’s like a crime is an act that when you’ve committed one, the act is over, and you haven’t changed inside. But when you commit a sin it’s like you create a condition that you have to live in.
—Russell Banks
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.
—Russell Banks
The received truth of history is shot through and falsified by unknown secrets carried to the grave.
—Russell Banks
It’s hard to know more about a person’s life than what that person wants you to know.
—Russell Banks
Fixing motives is like fixing blame-the further away from the act you get, the harder it is to single out one thing as having caused it.
—Russell Banks
What you believe matters. It’s all anyone has to act on. And since what you do is who you are, your actions define you. If you don’t believe anything is true simply because you can’t logically prove what’s true, you won’t do anything. You won’t be anything. You’ll end up spending your life in a rocking chair looking out at the horizon, waiting for an answer that never comes. You might as well be dead. It’s an old philosophical problem.
—Russell Banks
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