Chris Offutt Quotes

#1. I'd never really found a place in the outside world, but had stayed away too long to fit in at home.

Chris Offutt

#2. Books offered the promise of a world in which misfits like me could flourish. Within

Chris Offutt

#3. The secret is to start a story near the ending.

Chris Offutt

#4. I'd forced myself to interact with so much pornography, I no longer regarded my wife in a sexual manner. Each time I tried, my mind filled with images of fetish porn. I could admire her dress, legs and hips, but the response was aesthetic and intellectual, as if studying art I couldn't afford.

Chris Offutt

#5. The desktop held a patina of hieroglyphs representing years of student boredom - names and initials gouged into the wood, blackened by grime and pencil, shellacked over, then cobwebbed again with another generation's imprint.

Chris Offutt

#6. Sometimes I don't think I've done anything to leave my mark in this world. I'm the kind of person the world leaves a mark on.

Chris Offutt

#7. Most grandiose gestures are suspect - the couple who renew their vows just before divorce or the politician who publicly swears he's clean, then enters rehab. Building

Chris Offutt

#8. I don't miss my father, but without his shackles to strain against, the world is terrifying and vast. I have lost a kind of purpose, a reason to prove myself.

Chris Offutt

#9. He left and I wished I could go somewhere and start all over, which is how I've felt all my life. As soon as I get somewhere, I'm ready to leave.

Chris Offutt

#10. When I couldn't see the land out there, I forgot I wasn't at home. Sometimes I wished it was always night.

Chris Offutt

#11. If you've used adverbs, look at them carefully. Adverbs are the weakest words; verbs are the strongest. Many, many times I've found that I have the wrong verb so I'm attempting to cheat and modify the wrong verb by using an adverb.

Chris Offutt

#12. it occurred to him that time didn't move forward as he'd always thought. People move through time instead.

Chris Offutt

#13. Time piles up like brush. You burn it in the fall and all you remember are the glowing cinders. I got ash heaps everywhere I look. -Old of the Moon

Chris Offutt