Stuart Dybek Quotes

#1. In creation myths, a god shapes mud or clay into living form, much like a potter throws a pot or a sculptor reveals the statue within a block of marble. But a writer has to create his own clay or stone before he can begin shaping life from it.

Stuart Dybek

#2. A crowd of tourists were standing in the laundry room. They were speaking languages.

Stuart Dybek

#3. Rather than feeling that every moment you've got to exert this enormous control, you can take the attitude that your job as a writer is not to control everything, but to set things in motion.

Stuart Dybek

#4. The sound of dogs howling from the next homestead over. But the space between our houses grows while I sleep. The forest around me deepens. The trees fall in love and multiply. The snow an intoxicant. I pray the pines don't get bolder, that they don't grow organs and hands.

Stuart Dybek

#5. What chance did words have beside the distraction of her body?

Stuart Dybek

#6. The public library is where place and possibility meet.

Stuart Dybek

#7. Our plans for the future made us laugh and feel close, but those same plans somehow made anything more than temporary between us seem impossible. It was the first time I'd ever had the feeling of missing someone I was still with.

Stuart Dybek

#8. No matter how often he strips the past from her body, she finds a way to wear it again.

Stuart Dybek

#9. Most men complimented my sexual vigor, thinking I owed it to them. All of them credited themselves afterwards, but the dour clown just lay there. For a moment, I thought I loved him.

Stuart Dybek

#10. Sometimes, in a tight game with runners on, digging in at short, ready to break with the ball, a peace I'd never felt before would paralyze the diamond. For a moment of eternal stillness I felt as if I were cocked at the very heart of the Midwest.

Stuart Dybek

#11. Rob was lying just beyond the edge of the shadows thrown by her eyelashes.

Stuart Dybek

#12. Loaded with note cards for research papers that I was hopelessly behind on, I'd enter the Public Library only to end up wandering around lost, wasting the day.

Stuart Dybek