David Guterson

“The heart of justice is truth telling.”

“Accident ruled every corner of the universe except the chambers of the human heart.”

“History is a silent record of people who could not leave, who had no choice.”

“Facts, you see, are constructs. They are not truth.”

“That was the thing about the world: it wasn't that things were harder than you thought they were going to be, it was that they were hard in ways that you didn't expect.”

“We're all concerned about the future of American education. But as I tell my students, you do not enter the future. You create the future.”

“The world was not a place of honor.”

“The things that stayed were things that you could not be separated from.”

“War is a matter of circumstance. It's not a matter of choice. Everyone is suffering. Everyone is losing.”

“Your private life is your private life, but you can't choose your community.”

“What we call the past is a fiction, a construct, a story we tell ourselves.”

“His training had been in observation, not participation.”

“The basic problem is that everybody asks if truth is subjective or objective. I think it's both.”

“The solitude of a writer is a very loneliness, and it is this loneliness that allows him to speak to others.”

“It was a world of accidents, casual meetings, and chance encounters. People's lives could be changed forever by a whisper.”