Independence Day Quotes

“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

“Some idiotic things are well worth doing.”
― Richard Ford, Independence Day

“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

“(My greatest human flaw and strength, not surprisingly, is that I can always imagine anything--a marriage, a conversation, a government--as being different from how it is, a trait that might make one a top-notch trial lawyer or novelist or realtor, but that also seems to produce a somewhat less than reliable and morally feasible human being.)”
― Richard Ford, Independence Day

“All this is a natural part of the aging process, in which you find yourself with less to do and more opportunities to eat your guts out regretting everything you have done.”
― Richard Ford, Independence Day

“But to anyone reasonable, my life will seem more or less normal-under-the-microscope, full of contingencies and incongruities none of us escapes and which do little harm in an existence that otherwise goes unnoticed.”
― Richard Ford, Independence Day

“Any rainy summer morning, of course, has the seeds of gloomy alienation sown in. But a rainy summer morning far from home - when your personal clouds don't move but hang - can easily produce the feeling of the world as seen from the grave. This I know.”
― Richard Ford, Independence Day

“when you’re young your opponent is the future; but when you’re not young, your opponent’s the past and everything you’ve done in it and the problem of getting away from it.”
― Richard Ford, Independence Day: Bascombe Trilogy 2

“I don’t, after all, know what’s wrong with him, am not even certain anything is, or that wrong isn’t just a metaphor for something else, which may itself already be a metaphor. Though probably what’s amiss, if anything, is not much different from what’s indistinctly amiss with all of us at one time or another – we’re not happy, we don’t know why, and we drive ourselves loony trying to get better”
― Richard Ford, Independence Day

“Such narrowly missed human connection as this can in fact be fatal, no matter who's at fault, and often results in unrecoverable free fall and a too-hasty conclusion that 'the whole goddamn thing's not worth bothering with or it wouldn't be so goddamn confusing all the goddamn time,' after which one party (or both) just wanders off and never thinks to look toward the other again. Such is the iffiness of romance.”
― Richard Ford, Independence Day

“Though finally the worst thing about regret is that it makes you duck the chance of suffering new regret just as you get a glimmer that nothing's worth doing unless it has the potential of to fuck up your whole life”
― Richard Ford, Independence Day

“Sometimes, though not that often, I wish I were still a writer, since so much goes through anybody’s mind and right out the window, whereas, for a writer—even a shitty writer—so much less is lost. If you get divorced from your wife, for instance, and later think back to a time, say, twelve years before, when you almost broke up the first time but didn’t because you decided you loved each other too much or were too smart, or because you both had gumption and a shred of good character, then later after everything was finished, you decided you actually should’ve gotten divorced long before because you think now you missed something wonderful and irreplaceable and as a result are filled with whistling longing you can’t seem to shake—if you were a writer, even a half-baked short-story writer, you’d have someplace to put that fact buildup so you wouldn’t have to think about it all the time. You’d just write it all down, put quotes around the most gruesome and rueful lines, stick them in somebody’s mouth who doesn’t exist (or better, a thinly disguised enemy of yours), turn it into pathos and get it all off your ledger for the enjoyment of others.”
― Richard Ford, Independence Day: Bascombe Trilogy 2

“Suddenly my heart again goes bangety-bang, bangety-bangety-bang, as if I myself were about to exit life in a hurry. And if I could, I would spring up, switch on the light, dial someone and shout right down into the hard little receiver, “It’s okay. I got away. It was goddamned close, I’ll tell ya. It didn’t get me, though. I smelled its breath, saw its red eyes in the dark, shining. A clammy hand touched mine. But I made it. I survived. Wait for me. Wait for me. Not that much is left to do.” Only there’s no one. No one here or anywhere near to say any of this to. And I’m sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.”
― Richard Ford, Independence Day

“And I had the feeling he was far out ahead of me then and in many things. Any time spent with your child is partly a damn sad time, the sadness of life a-going, bright, vivid, each time a last. A loss. A glimpse into what could’ve been. It can be corrupting. I”
― Richard Ford, Independence Day: Bascombe Trilogy 2

“Possibly this is one more version of "disappearing into your life", the way career telephone company bigwigs, overdutiful parents and owners of wholesale lumber companies are said to do and never know it. You simply reach a point at which everything looks the same but nothing matters much. There's no evidence you're dead, but you act that way.”
― Richard Ford, Independence Day

“« Voyez-vous, d’après mon expérience, c’est quand on a l’impression de ne pas progresser qu’on avance sans doute le plus. »”
― Richard Ford, Independence Day

“You shouldn't think you're not supposed to be happy, Paul. You understand that? You shouldn't get used to not being happy just because you can't make everything fit down right. Everything doesn't fit down right. You have to let some things go finally.”
― Richard Ford, Independence Day

“I don’t care to see Dr. Stopler and have my weaknesses vetted. My weaknesses, after all, have taken me this far.”
― Richard Ford, Independence Day: Bascombe Trilogy 2

“It is a vacant vista, the acme of opulent American dreariness Ann has for some reason married into. I feel like getting up and walking out onto the lawn—waiting for my son in the grass.”
― Richard Ford, Independence Day: Bascombe Trilogy 2

“Ann says I fabricate these feelings. But so what? I still have them.”
― Richard Ford, Independence Day: Bascombe Trilogy 2

“Be sure you’re not completely wrong, then go ahead.”
― Richard Ford, Independence Day: Bascombe Trilogy 2

“Down the wide, cool center hall I head to the shadowy, high, tin-ceilinged kitchen that smells of garlic, fruit and refrigerator freon, where I unload my wine into the big Sub-Zero.”
― Richard Ford, Independence Day: Bascombe Trilogy 2

“Best just to swallow back your tear, get accustomed to the minor sentimentals and shove off to whatever’s next, not whatever was. Place means nothing.”
― Richard Ford, Independence Day: Bascombe Trilogy 2

“Houses can have this almost authorial power over us, seeming to ruin or make perfect our lives just by persisting in one place longer than we can. (In either case it’s a power worth defeating.)”
― Richard Ford, Independence Day: Bascombe Trilogy 2

“the one my son visits warn us about such feelings, flagging us all away from the poison of euphoria and hauling us back to flat earth, where they want us to be.)”
― Richard Ford, Independence Day: Bascombe Trilogy 2

“Though finally the worst thing about regret is that it makes you duck the chance of suffering new regret just as you get a glimmer that nothing’s worth doing unless it has the potential to fuck up your whole life.”
― Richard Ford, Independence Day: Bascombe Trilogy 2

“Plus, falling property values now ride through the trees like an odorless, colorless mist settling through the still air where all breathe it in, all sense it, though our new amenities—the new police cruisers, the new crosswalks, the trimmed tree branches, the buried electric, the refurbished band shell, the plans for the 4th of July parade—do what they civically can to ease our minds off worrying,”
― Richard Ford, Independence Day: Bascombe Trilogy 2

“Even the smallest public rigmarole is a pain in the ass, its true importance measurable not in the final effect but by how willing we are to leave our usual selves behind and by how much colossal bullshit and anarchy we’re willing to put up with in a worthwhile cause. I always like it better when clowns seem to try to be happy.”
― Richard Ford, Independence Day: Bascombe Trilogy 2

“apropos of nothing.”
― Richard Ford, Independence Day: Bascombe Trilogy 2

“(My greatest human flaw and strength, not surprisingly, is that I can always imagine anything—a marriage, a conversation, a government—as being different from how it is, a trait that might make one a top-notch trial lawyer or novelist or realtor, but that also seems to produce a somewhat less than reliable and morally feasible human being.)”
― Richard Ford, Independence Day: Bascombe Trilogy 2