Stuart Dybek said this quote

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.

~ Stuart Dybek

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.

~ Stuart Dybek

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.

~ Stuart Dybek

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

~ Stuart Dybek