"A sad fact, of course, about adult life is that you see the very things you'll never adapt to coming toward you on the horizon. You see them as the problems they are, you worry like hell about them, you make provisions, take precautions, fashion adjustments; you tell yourself you'll have to change your way of doing things. Only you don't. You can't. Somehow it's already too late. And maybe it's even worse than that: maybe the thing you see coming from far away is not the real thing, the thing that scares you, but its aftermath. And what you've feared will happen has already taken place. This is similar in spirit to the realization that all the great new advances of medical science will have no benefit for us at all, thought we cheer them on, hope a vaccine might be ready in time, think things could still get better. Only it's too late there too. And in that very way our life gets over before we know it. We miss it. And like the poet said: The ways we miss our lives are life."
— Richard Ford

"What was our life like? I almost don't remember now. Though I remember it, the space of time it occupied. And I remember it fondly."
— Richard Ford (The Sportswriter)

"What's friendship's realest measure?
I'll tell you. The amount of precious time you'll squander on someone else's calamities and fuck-ups."
— Richard Ford (The Sportswriter)

"When you are sixteen you do not know what your parents know, or much of what they understand, and less of what's in their hearts. This can save you from becoming an adult too early, save your life from becoming only theirs lived over again--which is a loss. But to shield yourself--as I didn't do--seems to be an even greater error, since what's lost is the truth of your parents' life and what you should think about it, and beyond that, how you should estimate the world you are about to live in."
— Richard Ford (Wildlife)

"Someone ... tell us what's important, because we no longer know."
— Richard Ford (A Multitude of Sins)

"They may already know too much about their mother and father--nothing being more factual than divorce, where so much has to be explained and worked through intelligently (though they have tried to stay equable). I've noticed this is often the time when children begin calling their parents by their first names, becoming little ironists after their parents' faults. What could be lonelier for a parent than to be criticized by his child on a first-name basis?"
— Richard Ford (The Sportswriter)

"Tweet, tweet, you're alive, you ignorant asshole."
— Richard Ford

"I know you can dream your way through an otherwise fine life, and never wake up, which is what I almost did."
— Richard Ford (The Sportswriter)

"And since that is not how it has been for a long time, you want, this time, to make it last, this glistening one moment, this cool air, this new living, so that you can preserve a feeling of it, inasmuch as when it comes again it may just be too late. You may just be too old. And in truth, of course, this may be the last time that you will ever feel this way again."
— Richard Ford (The Sportswriter)

"Maturity, as I conceived it, was recognizing what was bad or peculiar in life, admitting it has to stay that way, and going ahead with the best of things. "
— Richard Ford (The Sportswriter)

"It was on such a night as this that the unhappy things came about."
— Richard Ford (Rock Springs)

"Just exactly what that good life was--the one I expected--I cannot tell you now exactly, though I wouldn't say it has not come to pass, only that much has come in between."
— Richard Ford (The Sportswriter)

"For, how else to seize such an instant? How to shout out into the empty air just the right words, and on cue? Frame a moment to last a lifetime?"
— Richard Ford (Independence Day)

"And what there is to learn from almost any human experience is that your own interests usually do not come first where other people are concerned--even the people who love you--and that is all right. It can be lived with."
— Richard Ford (Wildlife)

"If you lose all hope, you can always find it again."
— Richard Ford (The Sportswriter)

"It is no loss to mankind when one writer decides to call it a day. When a
tree falls in the forest, who cares but the monkeys?"
— Richard Ford (The Sportswriter)

"For a time after my divorce everything began to seem profoundly ironic to
me. I found myself thinking of other peoples' worries as sources of amusement and private derision which I thought about at night to
make myself feel better."
— Richard Ford (The Sportswriter)

"...the worst thing about regret is that it makes you duck the chance of new regret, just as you get a glimmer that nothing is worth doing unless it has the potential to fuck up your whole life.
"
— Richard Ford (Independence Day)

"He smiled at me, and it was not the worried, nervous smile from before, but a smile that meant he was pleased. And I don't remember him ever smiling at me that way again."
— Richard Ford (Rock Springs)

"Fincher was the kind of Southerner who will try to address you through a web of deep and antic southernness, and who assumes every body in earshot knows all about his parents and history and wants to hear an update about them at every opportunity. He looks young, but still manages to act 65."
— Richard Ford (The Sportswriter)

"People surprise you, Frank, with just how fuckin stupid they are."
— Richard Ford (The Sportswriter)

"'Then, what's the matter?' I wonder, in fact, how many times I have said that or something equal to it to a woman passing palely through my life. What're you thinking? What's made you so quiet? You seem suddenly different. What's the matter? Love me is what this means, of course. Or at least, second best: surrender. Or at the very least, take some time regaling me with why you won't, and maybe by the end you will."
— Richard Ford (The Sportswriter)

"Your life doesn't mean what you have or what you get. Its what your'e willing to give up."
— Richard Ford (Wildlife)

"She looked at me and the expression on her face was an expression of dislike, one I hadn't seen before but knew right away. Later I would see it turned toward other people. But the first time was looking at me and was because she believed she'd done all she could that was correct and the best thing, and it had only gotten her stuck with me. And I couldn't do anything that mattered. Though if I could I would've had my father be there, or Warren Miller, or somebody who had the right words that would take the place of hers, anybody she could speak to without just hearing her own voice in a room and having to go about the trouble of pretending she did not feel absolutely alone."
— Richard Ford (Wildlife)

"It was if we all sensed we'd be gone someday soon in a sudden instant--often it happened in the middle of the night--and didn't want to get involved. Or else it was that none of us wanted to know anybody later on who was the way we were now."
— Richard Ford (The Sportswriter)

"She said that it was a mistake to have made as few superficial friends as I have done in my life, and to have concentrated only on the few things I have concentrated on--her, for one. My children, for another. Sportswriting and being an ordinary citizen. This did not leave me well enough armored for the unexpected, was her opinion. She said this was because I didn't know my parents very well, had gone to a military school, and grown up in the south, which was full of betrayers and secret-keepers and untrustworthy people, which I agree is true, though I never knew any of them."
— Richard Ford (The Sportswriter)

"I walked out of the condos onto the flat lithesome beach this morning, and took a walk in my swimming trunks and no shirt on. And I thought that one natural effect of life is to cover you in a thin layer of . . . what? A film? A residue or skin of all the things you've done and been and said and erred at? I'm not sure. But you are under it, and for a long time, and only rarely do you know it, except that for some unexpected reason or opportunity you come out--for an hour or even a moment--and you suddenly feel pretty good. And in that magical instant you realize how long it's been since you felt just that way. Have you been ill, you ask. Is life itself an illness or a syndrome? Who knows? We've all felt that way, I'm confident, since there's no way that I could feel what hundreds of millions of other citizens haven't.

Only suddenly, then, you are out of it--that film, that skin of life--as when you were a kid. And you think: this must've been the way it was once in my life, though you didn't know it then, and don't really even remember it--a feeling of wind on your cheeks and your arms, of being released, let loose, of being the light-floater. And since that is not how it has been for a long time, you want, this time, to make it last, this glistening one moment, this cool air, this new living, so that you can preserve a feeling of it, inasmuch as when it comes again it may just be too late. You may just be too old. And in truth, of course, this may be the last time that you will ever feel this way again."
— Richard Ford (The Sportswriter)

"Everything has seemed beckoning and ahead, though I am unsure now if life has not suddenly passed me like a big rumbling semi and left me flattened here by the road."
— Richard Ford (The Sportswriter)

"
If loneliness is the disease, the story is the cure.
"
— Richard Ford

"
If loneliness is the disease, the story is the cure.
"
— Richard Ford

"I had written all I was going to write, if the truth had been known, and there is nothing wrong with that. If more writers knew that, the world would be saved a lot of bad books, and more people--men and women alike--could go on to happier, more productive lives."
— Richard Ford (The Sportswriter)

"If there's another thing that sportswriting teaches you, it is that there are no transcendent themes in life. In all cases things are here and they're over, and that has to be enough."
— Richard Ford (The Sportswriter)

"I didn't know with certainty what to say about the large world, and didn't care to risk speculating. And I still don't. That we all look at it from someplace, and in some hopeful-useful way, is about all I found I could say--my best, most honest effort. And that isn't enough for literature, though it didn't bother me much. Nowadays, I'm willing to say yes to as much as I can: yes to my town, my neighborhood, my neighbor, yes to his car, her lawn and hedge and rain gutters. Let things be the best they can be. Give us all a good night's sleep until it's over."
— Richard Ford (The Sportswriter)