Richard Russo > Quotes

“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

“What if all everybody needed in the world was to be sure of one friend? What if you were the one, and you refused to say those simple words?”
― Richard Russo, Empire Falls

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

“To expect reason is where the fallacy lies.”
― Richard Russo, Straight Man

“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

“People sometimes get in the habit of being loyal to a mistake.”
― Richard Russo, Mohawk

“One of the odd things about middle age, he concluded, was the strange decisions a man discovers he's made by not really making them, like allowing friends to drift away through simple neglect.”
― Richard Russo

“Not giving a shit, she decided, is like the defrost option on a car's heater that miraculously unfogs the windshield, allowing you to see where you're headed.”
― Richard Russo, Empire Falls

“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

“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

“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

“The sad, fucking truth was that no matter who you are, you never, ever, get your fill.”
― Richard Russo, Empire Falls

“To his surprise, she leaned over and kissed him on the forehead, a kiss so full of affection that it dispelled the awkwardness, even as it caused Miles' heart to plummet, because all kisses are calibrated, and this one revealed the great chasm between affection and love.”
― Richard Russo, Empire Falls

“What I discovered I liked best about striking out on my bicycle was that the farther I got from home, the more interesting and unusual my thoughts became.”
― Richard Russo

“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

“In the end it all came down to companionship, to friendship, to sacrifice, to compromise.”
― 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

“The other possibility was that there was no right thing to say, that the choice wasn't between right and wrong but between wrong, more wrong, and as wrong as you can get.”
― Richard Russo, Empire Falls

“Knowing and knowing what to do about it were two different things.”
― Richard Russo, Mohawk

“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

“I was the one who did come through that door. You were the one she was waiting for.”
― Richard Russo, The Whore's Child: And Other Stories

“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 are a great many sins in this world, none of them original.”
― Richard Russo, Bridge of Sighs

“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

“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

“I don't tell you this story today in order to encourage all of you in the class of '04 to find careers in the music business, but rather to suggest what the next decade of your lives is likely to be about, and that is, trying to ensure that you don't wake up at 32 or 35 or 40 tenured to a life that happened to you when you weren't paying strict attention, either because the money was good, or it made your parents proud, or because you were unlucky enough to discover an aptitude for the very thing that bores you to tears, or for any of the other semi-valid reasons people marshal to justify allowing the true passion of their lives to leak away. If you're lucky, you may have more than one chance to get things right, but second and third chances, like second and third marriages, can be dicey propositions, and they don't come with guarantees.... The question then is this: How does a person keep from living the wrong life?”
― Richard Russo

“His carefully calculated sincerity is almost entirely indistinguishable from the real thing.”
― Richard Russo, Straight Man

“I'm about to fuck up, he thought clearly, and his next thought was, but I don't have to. This was followed closely by a third thought, the last of this familiar sequence, which was, but I'm going to anyway.”
― Richard Russo, Nobody's Fool

“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

“It's possible to overlook character flaws of in-laws for the simple reason that you feel neither responsible for them nor genetically implicated.”
― Richard Russo, Straight Man

“What an absolute folly love was. Talk about a flawed concept.”
― Richard Russo, The Whore's Child: And Other Stories

“You've become a clever man.”
― Richard Russo, Straight Man

“He looks like he could be taken in a fight. Not by me, but by somebody. Not anyone in Humanities, probably.”
― Richard Russo, Straight Man

“Who but an English professor would threaten to kill a duck a day and hold up a goose as an example?”
― Richard Russo, Straight Man

“It was a scary thought. A man could be surrounded by poetry reading and not know it.”
― Richard Russo, Nobody's Fool

“They're around back," she calls down when Julie and I get out. "Planning their strategy." "Good for them," I say, confident that no strategy that isn't grounded in chaos theory is likely to work against a man like me.”
― Richard Russo, Straight Man

“That man truly loathes you," Herbert says when he's sure Rourke isn't coming back.
"I don't think so," I smile. "I just give his life focus, that's all.”
― 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

“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

“The task he has chosen for himself, of wooing my mother with a bright red pickup truck, a Patsy Cline tape, and a string of malapropisms, is ample justification to me for not taking the world too seriously, its relentless heartbreak notwithstanding.”
― Richard Russo, Straight Man

“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

“I’ve always known that there’s more going on inside me than finds its way into the world, but this is probably true of everyone. Who doesn’t regret that he isn’t more fully understood?”
― Richard Russo, Bridge of Sighs

“Max would conclude, "that's who I want to be. The pope. And I'll do the same thing he does. I'll keep all the goddamn money.”
― Richard Russo, Empire Falls

“Can it be that what provides for us is the very thing that poisons us? Who hasn't considered this terrible possibility?”
― Richard Russo, Bridge of Sighs

“An imperfect human heart, perfectly shattered, was her conclusion. A condition so common as to be virtually universal, rendering issues of right and wrong almost incidental.”
― Richard Russo, Nobody's Fool