The Sportswriter Quotes

“People surprise you, Frank, with just how fuckin stupid they are.”
― Richard Ford, The Sportswriter

“If you lose all hope, you can always find it again.”
― Richard Ford, The Sportswriter

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“All we really want is to get to the point where the past can explain nothing about us and we can get on with life.”
― 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

“We are past the end of things now, but I don't want to leave.”
― Richard Ford, The Sportswriter

“Cynicism makes you feel smart, I know it, even when you aren't smart.”
― 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

“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

“Some things can't be explained. They just are. And after a while they disappear, usually forever, or become interesting in another way. Literature's consolations are always temporary, while life is quick to begin again. It is better not even to look so hard, to leave off explaining. Nothing makes me more queasy than to spend time with people who don't know that and who can't forget, and for whom such knowledge isn't a cornerstone of life.”
― 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

“Stop searching. Face the earth where you can. Literally speaking, it’s all you have to go on.”
― Richard Ford, The Sportswriter

“The world is a more engaging and less dramatic place than writers ever give it credit for being”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Teachers, let me tell you, are born deceivers of the lowest sort, since what they want from life is impossible — time-freed, existential youth forever. It commits them to terrible deceptions and departures from the truth. And literature, being lasting, is their ticket.”
― Richard Ford, The Sportswriter

“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

“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

“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

“For now let me say only this: if sportswriting teaches you anything, and there is much truth to it as well as plenty of lies, it is that for your life to be worth anything you must sooner or later face the possibility of terrible, searing regret. Though you must also manage to avoid it or your life will be ruined.”
― Richard Ford, The Sportswriter

“I'm a verb, Frank. Verbs don't answer questions.”
― Richard Ford, The Sportswriter

“Plenty of times I've seen writers, famous novelists and essayists, even poets, with names you'd recognize and whose work I admire, drift through these offices on one high-priced assignment or other. I have seen the anxious, weaselly lonely looks in their eyes, seen them sit at the desk we give them in a far cubicle, put their feet up and start at once to talk in loud, jokey, bluff, inviting voices, trying like everything to feel like members of the staff, holding court, acting like good guys, ready to give advice or offer opinions on anything anybody wants to know. In other words, having the time of their lives.

And who could blame them? Writers — all writers — need to belong. Only for real writers, unfortunately, their club is a club with just one member.”
― Richard Ford, The Sportswriter