quotes by Richard Yates

"…if you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone."
— Richard Yates (Revolutionary Road)

"I'm only interested in stories that are about the crushing of the human heart."
— Richard Yates

"The Revolutionary Hill Estates had not been designed to accommodate a tragedy. Even at night, as if on purpose, the development held no looming shadows and no gaunt silhouettes. It was invincibly cheerful, a toyland of white and pastel houses whose bright, uncurtained windows winked blandly through a dappling of green and yellow leaves … A man running down these streets in desperate grief was indecently out of place."
— Richard Yates (Revolutionary Road)

"Why did everything always change when all you wanted, all you had ever humbly asked of whatever God there might be, was that certain things be allowed to stay the same?"
— Richard Yates

""I still had this idea that there was a whole world of marvelous golden people somewhere, as far ahead of me as the seniors at Rye when I was in the sixth grade; people who knew everything instinctively, who made their lives work out the way they wanted without even trying, who never had to make the best of a bad job because it never occured to them to do anything less then perfectly the first time. Sort of heroic super-people, all of them beautiful and witty and calm and kind, and I always imagined that when I did find them I'd suddenly know that I Belonged among them, that I was one of them, that I'd been meant to be one of them all along, and everything in teh meantime had been a mistake; and they'd know it too. I'd be like the ugly duckling among the swans.""
— Richard Yates (Revolutionary Road)

"He couldn't even tell whether he was angry or contrite, whether it was forgiveness he wanted or the power to forgive."
— Richard Yates (Revolutionary Road)

"God knows there certainly ought to be a window around here somewhere, for all of us."
— Richard Yates (Eleven Kinds of Loneliness)

"if you don’t try at anything, you can’t fail… it takes back bone to lead the life you want"
— Richard Yates (Revolutionary Road)

""i mean talk about decadence," he declared, "how decadent can a society get? Look at it this way. This country's probably the psychiatric, psychoanalytical capital of the world. Old Freud himself could never've dreamed up a more devoted bunch of disciples than the population of the United States - isn't that right? Our whole damn culture is geared to it; it's the new religion; it's everybody's intellectual and spiritual sugar-tit. And for all that, look what happens when a man really does blow his top. Call the Troopers, get him out of sight quick, hustle him off and lock him up before he wakes the neighbors. Christ's sake, when it comes to any kind of showdown we're still in the Middle Ages. It's as if everybody'd made this tacit agreement to live in a state of total self-deception. The hell with reality! Let's have a whole bunch of cute little winding roads and cute little houses painted white and pink and baby blue; let's all be good consumers and have a lot of Togetherness and bring our children up in a bath of sentimentality -- and if old reality ever does pop out and say Boo we'll all get busy and pretend it never happened.""
— Richard Yates (Revolutionary Road)

"Are artists and writers the only people entitled to lives of their own?"
— Richard Yates (Revolutionary Road)

"No one forgets the truth; they just get better at lying"
— Richard Yates (Revolutionary Road)

"He had won but he didn't feel like a winner."
— Richard Yates (Revolutionary Road)

"It's a disease. Nobody thinks or feels or cares any more; nobody gets excited or believes in anything except their own comfortable little God damn mediocrity."
— Richard Yates (Revolutionary Road)

"You want to play house, you got to have a job. You want to play very nice house, very sweet house, then you got to have a job you don't like. Great. This is the way ninety-eight-point-nine per cent of the people work things out, so believe me, buddy, you've got nothing to apologize for."
— Richard Yates (Revolutionary Road)

"People did change, and a change could be a bloom as well as a withering..."
— Richard Yates (Revolutionary Road)

"...his job was the very least important part of his life, never to be mentioned except in irony."
— Richard Yates

"Hard work, is the best medicine yet devised for all the ills of man- and of woman."
— Richard Yates (Revolutionary Road)

"Our ability to measure and apportion time affords an almost endless source of comfort."
— Richard Yates (Revolutionary Road)

"'Synchronize watches at oh six hundred' says the infantry captain, and each of his huddled lieutenants finds respite from fear in the act of bringing two tiny pointers into jeweled alignment while tons of heavy artillery go fluttering overhead: the prosaic, civilian-looking dial of the watch has restored, however briefly, an illusion of personal control. Good, it counsels, looking tidily up from the hairs and veins of each terribly vulnerable wrist; fine: so far, everything's happening right on time. "
— Richard Yates (Revolutionary Road)

"And do you know a funny thing? I'm almost fifty years old and I've never understood anything in my whole life."
— Richard Yates (The Easter Parade)

"I want to retain my own identity. Therefore the thing I’m most anxious to avoid is any kind of work that can be considered ‘interesting’ in its own right. I want something that can’t possibly touch me. I want some big, swollen corporation that’s been bumbling along making money in its sleep for a hundred years, where they have to hire eight guys for every one job because none of them can be expected to care about whatever boring thing it is that they are supposed to be doing. I want to go into that kind of place and say, Look. You can have my body and my nice college-boy smile for so many hours a day, in exchange for so many dollars, and beyond that we’ll leave each other strictly alone."
— Richard Yates (Revolutionary Road)

""If you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be something that had to be done alone."
"
— Richard Yates

"He couldn't even tell whether he was angry or contrite, whether it was forgiveness he wanted or the power to forgive."
— Richard Yates (Revolutionary Road)

"I'm only interested in stories that are about the crushing of a human heart."
— Richard Yates

"She just happened to feel like it. Wasn’t that after all, the only reason there was? Had she ever had a less selfish, more complicated reason for doing anything in her life?"
— Richard Yates (Revolutionary Road)

"He found it so easy and so pleasant to cry that he didn’t try to stop for a while, until he realized he was forcing his sobs a little, exaggerating their depth with unnecessary shudders.
…
The whole point of crying is to quit before you coined it up. The whole point of grief itself was to cut it out while it was still honest, while it still meant something. Because the thing was so easily corrupted
"
— Richard Yates

"Dribbling their savings away on cheap food and furnished rooms, never knowing where Shep was or what kind of a mood he'd be in when he came home, never knowing what to say when he talked disjointedly of graduate courses in music and philosophy, or when he wanted to lounge for hours in the dry fountain of Washington Square with a four-day growth of beard, she has more than once gone as far as to look up 'psychiatrists' in the Classified New York Telephone Directory."
— Richard Yates (Revolutionary Road)