Quotes by Stuart Dybek

The public library is where place and possibility meet.

I recalled the afternoon when the two of us stood beating erasers, and Camille confided that shed done penance for stories - stories that Ill never know if she wrote or only imagined writing. Shed wanted me to tell her a secret from my dreams, a secret from my dreams I hadnt had as yet, and so I didnt quite understand what she was after.Its about feeling, Camille had insisted.I didnt understand then that she was talking about risk.

What art does is give us the refinement, all the shades of meaning, of emoting, that we don’t have language for. What fascinates me about that is we’re talking about an art form in which your medium is language. It’s almost a paradox that you’re seeing. I want to give you emotion, that if I just relied on diction, I wouldn’t have language for it.

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.

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.

Sometimes, in a tight game with runners on, digging in at short, ready to break with the ball, a peace Id 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.