"After all, what was the whole wide world but a place for people to yearn for their heart's impossible desires, for those desires to become entrenched in defiance of logic, plausibility, and even the passage of time, as eternal as polished marble. "
— Richard Russo (Empire Falls)

"To his surprise he also discovered that it was possible to be good at what you had little interest in, just as it had been possible to be bad at something, whether painting or poetry, that you cared about a great deal."
— Richard Russo

""Have you ever noticed that when people use the expression 'I have to say', what follows usually needn't be said?""
— Richard Russo (Bridge of Sighs)

"It pleased him to imagine God as someone like his mother, someone beleagured by too many responsibilities, too dog-tired to monitor an energetic boy every minute of the day, but who, out of love and fear for his safety, checked in on him whenever she could. Was this so crazy? ...Miles liked the idea of a God who, when He at last had the oppotunity to return His attention to His children, might shake His head with wonder and mutter, "Jesus. Look what they're up to now." A distractible God, perhaps, one who'd be startled to discover so many of His children way up in trees since the last time He looked. A God whose hand would go rushing to His mouth in fear in that instant of recognition that - good God! - that kid's going to hurt himself. A God who could be surprised by unanticipated pride - glory be, that boy is a climber!"
— Richard Russo (Empire Falls)

"I'll tell you one thing, though. It's a terrible thing to be a disappointment to a good woman."
— Richard Russo

""The line of gray along the horizon is brighter now, and with the coming light I feel a certainty: that there is, despite our wild imaginings, only one life. The ghostly others, no matter how real they seem, no matter how badly we need them, are phantoms. The one life we're left with is sufficient to fill and refill our imperfect hearts with joy, and then to shatter them. And it never, ever lets up."

"
— Richard Russo (Bridge of Sighs)

"As I drift back into sleep, I can't help thinking that it's a wonderful thing to be right about the world. To weigh the evidence, always incomplete, and correctly intuit the whole, to see the world in a grain of sand, to recognize its beauty, its simplicity, its truth. It's as close as we get to God in this life, and reside in the glow of such brief flashes of understanding, fully awake, sometimes for two or three seconds, at peace with our existence. And then back to sleep we go."
— Richard Russo (Straight Man: A Novel)

""I must be losing patience with my fellow humans," Miss Beryl went on. "Anymore I'm all for executing people who are mean to children. I used to favor just cutting off their feet. Now I want to rid the world of them completely. If this keeps up I'll be voting Republican soon.""
— Richard Russo (Nobody's Fool)

"Which is why we have spouses and children and parents and colleagues and friends, because someone has to know us better than we know ourselves. We need them to tell us. We need them to say, "I know you, Al. You are not the kind of man who.""
— Richard Russo (Straight Man)

"Don't even the best and most fortunate of lives hint at other possibilities, at a different kind of sweetness and, yes, bitterness too? Isn't this why we can't help feeling cheated, even when we know we haven't been?"
— Richard Russo (Bridge of Sighs)

"I feel a certainty: that there is, despite our wild imaginings, only one life. The ghostly others, no matter how real they seem, no matter how badly we need them, are phantoms. The one life we're left with is sufficient to fill and refill our imperfect hearts with joy and then to shatter them. And it never, ever lets up. Blame love."
— Richard Russo (Bridge of Sighs)

"I told him the truth, that I loved him and didn't regret anything about our lives together. But do we ever 'tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God' as my father used to say, to those we love? Or even to ourselves? Don't even the best and most fortunate of lives hint at other possibilities, at a different kind of sweetness and, yes, bitterness too? Isn't this why we can't help feeling cheated, even when we know we haven't been?"
— Richard Russo (Bridge of Sighs)

"You've become a clever man."
— Richard Russo (Straight Man)

"When my nose finally stops bleeding and I've disposed of the bloody paper towels, Teddy Barnes insists on driving me home in his ancient Honda Civic, a car that refuses to die and that Teddy, cheap as he is, refuses to trade in."
— Richard Russo (Straight Man: A Novel)

"Truth be told, I'm not an easy man. I can be an entertaining one, though it's been my experience that most people don't want to be entertained. They want to be comforted. And, of course, my idea of entertaining might not be yours. I'm in complete agreement with all those people who say, regarding movies, 'I just want to be entertained.' This populist position is much derided by my academic colleagues as simpleminded and unsophisticated, evidence of questionable analytical and critical acuity. But I agree with the premise, and I too just want to be entertained. That I am almost never entertained by what entertains other people who just want to be entertained doesn't make us philosophically incompatible. It just means that we shouldn't go to movies together."
— Richard Russo (Straight Man)

"The drive back to the Mid-fucking-west was always brutal, his parents barely speaking to each other, as if suddenly recalling last year's infidelities, or maybe contemplating whom they'd settle for this year. Sex, if you went by Griffin's parents, definitely took a backseat to real estate on the passion gauge."
— Richard Russo (That Old Cape Magic)

"He'd discovered that his memories of that summer were like bad movie montages - young lovers tossing a Frisbee in the park, sharing a melting ice-cream cone, bicycling along the river, laughing, talking, kissing, a sappy score drowning out the dialogue because the screenwriter had no idea what these two people might say to each other."
— Richard Russo (That Old Cape Magic)

"Though here his voice faltered, because he knew as well as she did what came next, what words came next. If he could speak them, he might even convince her they were true, as his father had convinced his mother that Browning summer. It was the worst lie there was, imprisoning and ultimately embittering the hearer, playing upon her terrible need to believe. He could feel the I love you forming on his lips. Would he have said it if she hadn't interrupted?"
— Richard Russo (That Old Cape Magic)

""There have been times," Father Mark admitted, "when I feared that God would turn out to be like my maternal grandmother [...] Ours was a large family, and every Christmas my grandmother gave gifts of cash in varying amounts, claiming she was rewarding her grandchildren according to how much they loved her. She swore she could look right into our hearts and know. One child would get a crisp fifty-dollar bill, the next a crumpled single. No two gifts were ever in the same amount."
Miles nodded. "Well, maybe there's a hell.""
— Richard Russo (Empire Falls)

"To expect reason is where the fallacy lies."
— Richard Russo (Straight Man)

"In the end it all came down to companionship, to friendship, to sacrifice , to compromise.""
— Richard Russo (Bridge of Sighs)

"For people who dealt largely in dreams, his father was fond of observing, realtors were a surprisingly unromantic bunch, like card counters in a Vegas casino."
— Richard Russo (That Old Cape Magic)

"And there comes a time in your life when you realize that if you don't take the opportunity to be happy, you may never get another chance again."
— Richard Russo (Empire Falls)

""If you paid me for work," continued Max, whose rhetoric was more sophisticated than you might expect from a man with food in his beard, "I wouldn't have to feel worthless. There's not law says old people have to feel worthless all the while, you know. You paid me, I'd have some dignity."

Now it was Mile's turn to nod and smile agreeably. "I think the dignity ship set sail a long time ago, Dad.""
— Richard Russo (Empire Falls)

""She never answers during the day," Max explained. "She lets her machine pick up."

"People like you are the reason other people get answering machines to begin with," Miles told him. "In fact, people like you are driving a lot of modern technology.""
— Richard Russo (Empire Falls)

""I was the one who did come through that door. You were the one she was waiting for.""
— Richard Russo (The Whore's Child)

"What an absolute folly love was. Talk about a flawed concept."
— Richard Russo (The Whore's Child)

"But of course everything had conspired to spoil her entrance, which only went to prove what Janine already knew: that no matter how well you planned something, God always planned better. If He was feeling stingy that day and didn't want you to have some little thing you had your heart set on, then you weren't going to get it and that was all there was to it."
— Richard Russo (Empire Falls)