Everybody's Fool Quotes

“We don’t forgive people because they deserve it,” she said. “We forgive them because we deserve it.”
― Richard Russo, Everybody's Fool

“Rub wiped his nose on his sleeve. “I just wisht—” “What?” Rub sighed. Where to begin? “That I’d be nicer to you?” He shrugged again, but this was the gist of it, Sully could tell. “I wish I would, too,” he said, and for some reason this seemed to cheer Rub up.”
― Richard Russo, Everybody's Fool

“I also think it’s possible for us to be better people tomorrow than we are today.” He had no idea, of course, whether any of these things were true, in whole or in part. Still, what possible good could come of believing otherwise? —”
― Richard Russo, Everybody's Fool

“Just the once, though. Because standing there in Hilldale he’d felt nothing, which meant, he supposed, that Miss Beryl had been right; there was indeed such a thing as being too late. Normandy, the hedgerows, the Hürtgen Forest, the camps and finally Berlin…they all added up to this: too late. Had he found himself in war, as young men were often thought to do? Perhaps. He’d acquitted himself well in battle, proven competent in the face of fear. But had he also lost something he wasn’t sure he possessed to begin with? Had his self, the one Miss Beryl was worried about, been harmed? He remembered the look on her face when she first saw him again, an expression comprising relief and the old affection, but also a recognition that the boy who’d gone away to war both was and wasn’t the man who returned from it.”
― Richard Russo, Everybody's Fool

“Like so many men who resent the authority of others, Big Jim hated for his own to be questioned.”
― Richard Russo, Everybody's Fool

“He wasn’t just placing himself at risk; he was putting his self at risk, the same self that Thoreau thought was worth defending and protecting, the self whose primacy Emerson had argued for. (They’d read “Civil Disobedience” and “Self-Reliance” in her eighth-grade class.) The young, she claimed, were always being asked to risk who they really were, deep down, before they’d even had the opportunity to become acquainted. In her view it was wrong to ask them to gamble something they didn’t even know they possessed, much less what it might be worth.”
― Richard Russo, Everybody's Fool

“These days his own storytelling was undermined by his stammer, as well as by his conviction that a story had to be true.”
― Richard Russo, Everybody's Fool

“can”
― Richard Russo, Everybody's Fool

“Maybe that was what marriage meant, except that in theirs it had been a one-way street. He couldn't think of a single behavior of Becka's that he had altered in the slightest. But perhaps that was because there was so little he'd wanted to change, whereas she'd evidently viewed him as a fixer-upper from the start, structurally sound, the sort of property you wouldn't mind owning after you'd completed all the necessary renovations. First, though, you'd have to gut it, which was pretty much how Raymer felt by the end. As if the overhaul of his person was coming in over budget, and the person footing the bills was having serious second thoughts.”
― Richard Russo, Everybody's Fool

“Still, what made people tick was no great mystery, was it? Greed. Lust. Anger. Jealousy. You could almost let your voice fall right there. Love? Some people claimed it made the world go round, but he wasn't so sure about that. Love mostly turned out to be one of those other emotions, or a mixture of them, in disguise. Even if it did exist, Raymer doubted its relevance to much of anything.”
― Richard Russo, Everybody's Fool

“Man starts thinking this late in life, no previous experience or proper guidance,”
― Richard Russo, Everybody's Fool

“Yes. He loves us all. “No!” Tunic emphatically disagreed. “God does not.” Well, fuck him, then, Raymer thought, giddy with heat and blasphemy. Shame on God. “Because a shirker is a coward.” No, God is.”
― Richard Russo, Everybody's Fool

“«Y a Raymer, mientras la esperaba, le dio por pensar que esperar a una mujer que había olvidado algo era uno de los placeres más infravalorados de la vida.Cuántas veces, a punto de ir a cualquier lugar con Becka, ella había tenido que volver atrás porque se había dejado algo encima de la mesa de la cocina. Un hábito molesto, sí, pero qué maravilloso era cuando la veía reaparecer, qué dulce saber que no se había ido para siempre. Hasta el día en que sí se fue».”
― Richard Russo, Tonto de remate

“Amazing, isn’t it, when you think about it, how the world keeps on turning, no matter how fucked up things get?” In”
― Richard Russo, Everybody's Fool

“witness the sad demise of fundamental Western values. Pride. Order. Personal responsibility.”
― Richard Russo, Everybody's Fool

“Because if you were God, it stood to reason your real enemy would be boredom. Sully”
― Richard Russo, Everybody's Fool

“Since turning in his resignation, he’d been wondering what he might do next. Suddenly his path seemed clear. He would become an alcoholic. He”
― Richard Russo, Everybody's Fool

“What can’t be undeniably is and will be forevermore. Except here, too, you’re wrong. Because gradually, after the shock wears off, the world returns to its familiar old habits, seemingly satisfied to have thrown you for a giant loop and content to await the return of your complacence so it can slip a venomous snake into your damn sock drawer, thereby demonstrating yet again that it, not you, is in charge and always will be, you dumb fuck.”
― Richard Russo, Everybody's Fool

“A minute ago they’d been faced with a thorny existential dilemma, possibly spiritual in nature, only to have it unexpectedly redefined as an urge that only a delivery pizza could satisfy.”
― Richard Russo, Everybody's Fool

“Full,” as if emptiness were the prevailing condition of their lives, from which eating provided a temporary respite.”
― Richard Russo, Everybody's Fool