quotes by Richard Russo

"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)

"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)

"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)

""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)

"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 expect reason is where the fallacy lies."
— 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'll tell you one thing, though. It's a terrible thing to be a disappointment to a good woman."
— Richard Russo