Russell Hoban Quotes

My generation in Japan lived in limbo. We dreamed between two worlds.

Being on tour is like being in limbo. It's like going from nowhere to nowhere.

Standing in the middle of nowhere, wondering how to begin. Lost between tomorrow and yesterday, between now and then.

…balancing the wish to be lost with the need to be found.

She didn't like being twelve. It felt like someplace between who she'd been and who she was about to be. It felt like no place at all.

The Death of the contemporary forms of social order ought to gladden rather than trouble the soul. Yet what is frightening is that the departing world leaves behind it not an heir, but a pregnant widow. Between the death of the one and the birth of the other, much water will flow by, a long night of chaos and desolation will pass.

The answer is blowin' in the wind.

Now all of us in our thirties are the first generation that get to say, "I don't know how I feel about that system, I don't know if I want kids, I don't know if I want to get married."

The more that you follow me, the more I get lost

It's all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.

I wish that someone had said to me that it's normal to feel lost for a little while.

You've decided to love me for eternity, I'm still deciding who I want to be today.

I was born wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born, and have made, in a curious way, the worst of both.

When I was coming up, it was a dangerous world, and you knew exactly who they were. It was us vs them, and it was clear who them was. Today, we are not so sure who the they are, but we know they're there.

Am I lost or just less found?

Parents feel like immigrants in the country of the young.

Having lived long enough to go at least once or twice around the block, I'm noticing that the strangeness is not receding The strangeness seems to be accelerating.

Well, I've been waiting, I was sure we'd meet between the trains we're waiting for I think it's time to board another Please understand, I never had a secret chart to get me to the heart of this or any other matter

Gertrude Stein did us the most harm when she said, 'You're all a lost generation.' That got around to certain people and we all said, 'Whee! We're lost.

Change is like that: you are no longer where you were; you are not yet where you will get; you are nowhere exactly.

I stared at the creased map on my wall, the thin green line connecting all the places I had read about. There they were, all the cities of my imaginary future, held together with tape and marker and pins. In six months, a lot had changed. There was no thin green line that could lead me to my future anymore. Just a girl.

Is it conceivable that a newly emancipated people can soar to the heights of liberty, and, unlike Icarus, neither have its wings melt nor fall into an abyss? Such a marvel is inconceivable and without precedent. There is no reasonable probability to bolster our hopes.

People have passed through a very dark tunnel at the end of which there was a light of freedom. Unexpectedly they passed through the prison gates and found themselves in a square. They are now free and they don't know where to go.

Sometimes limbo is a tolerable place to be stuck.

Placed on this isthmus of a middle state.