Young Hearts Crying Quotes

“Know what we did, Lucy? You and me? We spent our whole lives yearning. Isn't that the God damndest thing?”
― Richard Yates, Young Hearts Crying

“She had found in the past that a voluptuously long, hot shower cold be made to seem almost as health-giving as a night's sleep; she had learned too that taking exquisite pains over the selection and putting-on of clothes could sometimes be as good a way as any of helping the hours to pass.”
― Richard Yates, Young Hearts Crying

“Everybody's essentially alone', she'd told him, and he was beginning to see a lot of truth in that. Besides: now that he was older, and now that he was home, it might not even matter how the story turned out in the end.”
― Richard Yates, Young Hearts Crying

“How could you ever learn to trust the things you made up?”
― Richard Yates, Young Hearts Crying

“Look, I can explain everything” was the most commonly used line of dialogue in the history of American movies”
― Richard Yates, Young Hearts Crying

“When you wrote it didn't matter if hysteria sometimes came up in your face and voice (unless, of course, you let it find its way into your "literary voice") because writing was done in merciful privacy and silence. Even if you were partly out of your mind it might turn out to be all right: you could try for control even harder than Blanche Dubois was said to have tried, and with luck you could still bring off a sense of order and sanity on the page for the reader. Reading, after all, was a thing done in privacy and silence too.”
― Richard Yates, Young Hearts Crying

“There she was, lying on a single bed in a room so small that there wasn't even space for a chair, and the first thing that struck him was that she was beautiful. She had lost too much weight - her long legs were too thin in greasy jeans and her upper body looked as frail as a bird's under a greasy workman's shirt - but her pale and famished face, with its great blue eyes and delicate, thin-lipped mouth, made her look like the heartbreaking debutante her mother might always have wanted her to be.”
― Richard Yates, Young Hearts Crying

“Acting might bring on emotional exhaustion, but writing tired your brains out. Writing led to depression and insomnia and walking around all day with a haggard look.”
― Richard Yates, Young Hearts Crying

“Well, I can’t imagine having a great deal of money,” Ann Blake was saying as the flames crackled. “I’ve never even given it much thought, because all I ever wanted was a great deal of talent – and I’d gladly have settled for even a modest amount of that. Still, I suppose the two things are sort of alike. Having either one sets you apart. Being born with either one can bring you more than most people allow themselves to dream of, but they both require an unfailing sense of responsibility. If you ignore them, or neglect them, all the good of them slides away into idleness and waste. And the terrible thing, Lucy, is how easily idleness and waste can become a way of life.”
― Richard Yates, Young Hearts Crying

“The only trouble at first was that one small, cold-sober part of her mind floated free of the rest of her; it was able to observe how solemn a man could be at times like this, how earnest in his hairy nakedness, and how predictable. You had only to offer up your breasts and there was his hungering mouth on one and then the other of them, drawing the nipples out hard; you had only to open your legs and there was his hand at work on you, tirelessly burrowing. Then you got his mouth again, and then you got the whole of him, boyishly proud of his first penetration, lunging and thrusting and ready to love you forever, if only to prove that he could.”
― Richard Yates, Young Hearts Crying

“Sometimes it seemed that he'd said six or eight funny things in his life, and that what passed for his sense of humor would always depend on a skillful recycling of old material, over and over again.”
― Richard Yates, Young Hearts Crying

“Michael stared down into his glass as if alcohol, taken in reasonable quantities, might turn out to be an effective precaution against dying of boredom.”
― Richard Yates, Young Hearts Crying

“Because he was closer to her here than in the office, and less shy than in the car, he could see clearly now what he'd only been able to guess at before: the texture of her skin was what had made him want to pull off her clothes the moment he'd seen her. It was like the surface of a flawless apricot or nectarine; it glowed; it needed to be taken and eaten. A small edge of white lace could be glimpsed just inside the V-neck of her dress, moving with each breath and quivering when she laughed, and that frivolous, unconscious touch of flirtation made him heavy with lust.”
― Richard Yates, Young Hearts Crying