Beth Richardson Gutcheon famous quotes

Well. I don't suppose you have to believe in ghosts to know that we are all haunted, all of us, by things we can see and feel and guess at, and many more things that we can't.
-- Beth Richardson Gutcheon

#Believe #Ghost #Wells

I became a writer because I love to read, yet I never get to unless I'm reviewing a book or doing research.
-- Beth Richardson Gutcheon

#Book #Research #Love To Read

If you're going to spend two or three years immersed in a subject, you better be deeply interested in it, or it won't be interesting to the reader.
-- Beth Richardson Gutcheon

#Years #Two #Interesting

I love smart commercial fiction. Susan Isaacs, for example and the readers who interest me are, in the preponderance, women. I am one of them; I like the books they like.
-- Beth Richardson Gutcheon

#Smart #Book #Example

I'm very interested, in all my books, in community, what binds people together, which I think is an obvious consequence of being the fourth of six children.
-- Beth Richardson Gutcheon

#Children #Book #Thinking

I've found in the past that the more closely I identify with the heroine, the less completely she emerges as a person. So from the first novel I've been learning techniques to distance myself from the characters so that they are not me and I don't try to protect them in ways that aren't good for the story.
-- Beth Richardson Gutcheon

#Distance #Character #Past

How quickly a person in pain whom you can't help becomes a reproach. And then, no doubt, a thorn.
-- Beth Richardson Gutcheon

#Pain #Doubt #Helping

I cannot understand how any man or woman can believe in the Lord's coming and not be a missionary, or at least committed to the work of missions with every power of his being.

The gods have fled, I know. My sense is the gods have always been essentially absent. I do not believe human beings have played games or sports from the beginning merely to summon or to please or to appease the gods. If anthropologists and historians believe that, it is because they believe whatever they have been able to recover about what humankind told the gods humankind was doing. I believe we have played games, and watched games, to imitate the gods, to become godlike in our worship of eachother and, through those moments of transmutation, to know for an instant what the gods know.

I'm still agnostic. But in the words of Elton Richards, I'm now a reverant agnostic. Which isn't an oxymoron, I swear. I now believe that whether or not there's a God, there is such a thing as sacredness. Life is sacred. The Sabbath can be a sacred day. Prayer can be a sacred ritual. There is something transcendent, beyond the everyday. It's possible that humans created this sacredness ourselves, but that doesn't take away from its power or importance.

Perhaps we always want the person we love, to have the existence of a ghost.

Only times and places, only names and ghosts.

There is no ghost so difficult to lay as the ghost of an injury.

The Futurists?.... Well, of course, they are already past.

I know too well the poison and the sting of things too sweet.

I'm glad that my films have been consistently faring well rather than one stray Friday!

Playing well with others isn't all it's cracked up to be.