Garth Stein Quotes

“To live every day as if it had been stolen from death, that is how I would like to live. To feel the joy of life, as Eve felt the joy of life. To separate oneself from the burden, the angst, the anguish that we all encounter every day. To say I am alive, I am wonderful, I am. I am. That is something to aspire to.”

— Garth Stein

“The true hero is flawed. The true test of a champion is not whether he can triumph, but whether he can overcome obstacles - preferably of his own making - in order to triumph.”

— Garth Stein

“That which is around me does not affect my mood; my mood affects that which is around me.”

— Garth Stein

You should shine with all of your light all the time.

— Garth Stein

“The car goes where the eyes go.”

— Garth Stein

“[T]he race is long - to finish first, first you must finish.”

— Garth Stein

“When I return to the world, I will be a man. I will walk among you. I will lick my lips with my small, dexterous tongue. I will shake hands with other men, grasping firmly with my opposable thumbs. And I will teach all people that I know. And when I see a man or a woman or a child in trouble, I will extend my hand, both metaphorically and physically. I will offer my hand. To him. To her. To you. To the world. I will be a good citizen, a good partner in the endeaver of life that we all share.”

— Garth Stein

“We had a good run, and now it's over; what's wrong with that?”

— Garth Stein

“The craft of writing is all the stuff that you can learn through school; go to workshops and read books. Learn characterization, plot and dialogue and pacing and word choice and point of view. Then there's also the art of it which is sort of the unknown, the inspiration, the stuff that is noncerebral.”

— Garth Stein

Using a dog as a narrator has limitations and it has advantages. The limitations are that a dog cannot speak. A dog has no thumbs. A dog can't communicate his thoughts except with gestures.

— Garth Stein

“I think the one that's going to be the hardest to make into a film is the one that's probably going to be made into a film, which is 'The Art of Racing in the Rain.' I mean, it's narrated by a dog. How do you do that? But hopefully we'll get to see.”

— Garth Stein

“I know in this time of great technological advancement, the idea of reading a book seems almost anachronistic, but I think it's worth preserving.”

— Garth Stein

“Those monkey-thumbs were meant for dogs. Give me my thumbs, you fu**ing monkeys!”

— Garth Stein

“The sun rises every day. What is to love? Lock the sun in a box. Force the sun to overcome adversity in order to rise. Then we will cheer! I will often admire beautiful sunrise, but I will never consider the sun a champion for having risen.”

— Garth Stein

“Sometimes I believe ... Sometimes I really do believe.”

— Garth Stein

“Gestures are all that I have; sometimes they must be grand in nature.”

— Garth Stein

“I marveled at them both; how difficult it must be to be a person. To constantly subvert your desires. To worry about doing the right thing, rather than doing what is most expedient. At that moment, honestly, I had grave doubts as to my ability to interact on such a level. I wondered if I could ever become the human I hoped to be.”

— Garth Stein

“These are things that only dogs and women understand because we tap into the pain directly, we connect to pain directly from its source, and so it is at once brilliant and brutal and clear, like white-hot metal spraying out of a fire hose, we can appreciate the aesthetic while taking the worst of it straight in the face. Men, on the other hand, are all filters and deflectors and timed release.”

— Garth Stein

“In Seattle we live among the trees and the waterways, and we feel we are rocked gently in the cradle of life. Our winters are not cold and our summers are not hot and we congratulate ourselves for choosing such a spectacular place to rest our heads.”

— Garth Stein

“Because memory is time folding back on itself. To remember is to disengage from the present. In order to reach any kind of success in automobile racing, a driver must never remember.”

— Garth Stein

She was my rain. She was my unpredictable element. She was my fear. But a racer should not be afraid of rain; a racer should embrace the rain.

— Garth Stein

“People speak of a will to live. They rarely speak of a will to die. Because people are afraid of death. Death is dark and unknown and frightening. But not for me. It is not the end.”

— Garth Stein

“I've always felt almost human. I've always known that there's something about me that's different than other dogs. Sure, I'm stuffed into a dog's body, but that's just the shell. It's what's inside that's important. The soul. And my soul is very human.”

— Garth Stein

“He is so brilliant. He shines. He's beautiful with his hands that grab things and his tongue that says things and the way he stands and chews his food for so long, mashing it into a paste before he swallows.”

— Garth Stein

“Racing is about discipline and intelligence, not about who has the heavier foot. The one who drives smart will always win in the end.”

— Garth Stein

“To finish the race first, you must first finish the race.”

— Garth Stein

Can we not will ourselves to achieve the impossible? Can we not use the power of our life force to change something: one small thing, one insignificant moment, one breath, one gesture? Is there nothing we can do to change what is around us?

— Garth Stein

“People, like dogs, love repetition. Chasing a ball, lapping a course in a race car, sliding down a slide. Because as much as each incident is similar, so it is different.”

— Garth Stein

“I also believe that man's continued domestication (if you care to use that silly euphemism) of dogs is motivated by fear: fear that dogs, left to evolve on their own, would, in fact, develop thumbs and smaller tongues, and therefore would be superior to men, who are slow and cumbersome, standing erect as they do. This is why dogs must live under the constant supervision of people ... From what Denny has told me about the government and its inner workings, it is my belief that this despicable plan was hatched in a back room of none other than the White House, probably by an evil adviser to a president of questionable moral and intellectual fortitude, and probably with the correct assessment-unfortunately, made from a position of paranoia rather than of spiritual insight-that all dogs are progressively inclined regarding social issues.”

— Garth Stein

“The first time I saw you,' he says, 'I knew we belonged together.”

— Garth Stein

With a book-presuming it's a good book-you can depend upon an outcome that adheres to the necessities of drama. The question will be answered. It has to be. The answer may not be happy; we can't guarantee a comedy. Sometimes tragedy strikes. But there will be a conclusion. Of that we can be sure. That's the whole point of a book. But in real life, there is no guarantee that any question will ever be answered. Real life is messy because we don't know where it's going to go.

— Garth Stein

The smell would have given me an erection if I'd still had testicles.

— Garth Stein

“We are all connected. The living to the nonliving, as the nonliving to the living. All things in all directions in all times. It is only in the physical dimension that we have limitations. (The membrane between us is thinner than you think.)”

— Garth Stein

“You're scaring the dog, Trish pointed out. She rarely called me by name. They do that in
prisoner of war camps, I've heard. Depersonalization.”

— Garth Stein

“Your car goes where your eyes go. Simply another way of saying that which you manifest is before you.”

— Garth Stein

“(C)hoice without alternative is only a sleight of hand; it is a magician's force-play, during which you believe you have free well, but your fate has already been decided: the magician knows which card you will pick!”

— Garth Stein

We are all connected
I believed it then and believe it still now
at least in an energetic sense. And who's to say this energy is not real? We can't see gravity, either, yet we don't deny it. We can't see magnetism, yet we don't question its forcefulness. So, why, then, when people
spiritual people
talk about a force of substance that binds us all, that unites us all
when these people talk about souls
why do we dismiss them as charlatans?

— Garth Stein

“That what you manifest is before you”

— Garth Stein

“Yet for every peak there is a valley.”

— Garth Stein

Oh, my faith has flagged at times. It's easy to fall back into the same routines and paint over the sublime with coat after coat of indifference ... I promise you something: when you have touched the face of God, you can never unlearn what you have learned. You can never unsee what you have seen.

— Garth Stein

“Stories continue in all directions to include even the retelling of the stories themselves, as legend is informed by interpretation, and interpretation is informed by time.”

— Garth Stein

“Such a simple concept, yet so true. That which we manifest is before us, we are the creators of our own destiny.”

— Garth Stein

“What can I do but force myself to remember? Try to imprint what I know on my soul, a thing that has no surface, no sides, no pages, no form of any kind. Carry it so deeply in the pockets of my existence that when I open my eyes and look down at my new hands with their thumbs that are able to close tightly around their fingers, I will already know. I will already see.”

— Garth Stein

Oh, how I wished I could speak. How I wished for thumbs. I could have grabbed his shirt collar. I could have pulled him close to me, so close he could feel my breath on his skin, and I could have said to him, "This is just a crisis. A flash! A single match struck against the implacable darkness of time! You are the one who taught me to never give up. You taught me that new possibilities emerge for those who are prepared, for those who are ready. You have to believe!" But I couldn't say that. I could only look at him.

— Garth Stein

But I totally understood that what filled us with energy could be irritating to someone else,

— Garth Stein

“To remember is to leave the present.”

— Garth Stein

He says racing is doing. It is being a part of a moment and being aware of nothing else but that moment. Reflection must come at a later time.

— Garth Stein

How quickly a year passes, like a mouthful of food snatched from the maw of eternity.

— Garth Stein

I understood that, as a dog, I could never be as interactive with humanity as I truly desired. Yet, I realized at that moment, I could be something else. I could provide something of need to the people around me.

— Garth Stein

“If I went to someone for therapy, I wouldn't be a writer ... I would just be well adjusted.”

— Garth Stein