The Collected Stories Quotes

“Dan Rosenthal rose happily from his drawing board to shake hands on hearing there was a baby on the way. But after that brief ceremony, when we'd both sat down again, he peered at me reflectively. "How can you be a father," he asked, "when you still look like a son?" ”
― Richard Yates, The Collected Stories

“There was plenty of liquor flowing, but most of it seemed to be going down my mother's throat.”
― Richard Yates, The Collected Stories

“And when the sobs finally begin they are long, scalding ones, the kind that come again and again.”
― Richard Yates, The Collected Stories

“But if excellence is easy to admire it is hard to like,”
― Richard Yates, The Collected Stories of Richard Yates

“I had discovered, or rediscovered, that crying is a pleasure—that it can be a pleasure beyond all reckoning if your head is pressed in your mother's waist and her hands are on your back, and if she happens to be wearing clean clothes.”
― Richard Yates, The Collected Stories

“   "You know this guy in the office I've told you about?" I said to Eileen one night. "The artist? Dan Rosenthal? I think he's getting into practice for being an old man."
   "Oh? How do you mean?"
   "Well, he's getting so—ah, I can't explain it. I'm not even sure if I've got it right."
   She could seldom explain anything to me about people in her office, either. Our conversations often dissolved into admissions that we weren't even sure if we had it right, and then there would be silence until a quarrel broke out over something else.”
― Richard Yates, The Collected Stories

“She was probably sixty, a big rawboned woman with a man's face, and her clothes, if not her very pores, seemed always to exude that dry essence of pencil shavings and chalk dust that is the smell of school. She was strict and humorless, preoccupied with rooting out the things she held intolerable: mumbling, slumping, daydreaming, frequent trips to the bathroom, and, the worst of all, "coming to school without proper supplies."  ”
― Richard Yates, The Collected Stories

“But it didn't last.”
― Richard Yates, The Collected Stories

“My time on the financial desk had become a slow ordeal of waiting for my superiors to discover more and more of how little I knew about what I was doing; and now however pathetically willing I might be to learn all the things I was supposed to know, it had become much too ludicrously late to ask.”
― Richard Yates, The Collected Stories

“There was nothing to do now but let the thing happen and try to take it as gracefully as possible.
   That was when the childhood memory began to prey on his mind, for it suddenly struck him—and the force of it sent his thumbnail biting deep into the secret matchbook—that letting things happen and taking them gracefully had been, in a way, the pattern of his life. There was certainly no denying that the role of good loser had always held an inordinate appeal for him.”
― Richard Yates, The Collected Stories

“I had discovered, or rediscovered, that crying is a pleasure—that it can be a pleasure beyond all reckoning if your head is pressed in your mother’s waist and her hands are on your back, and if she happens to be wearing clean clothes.”
― Richard Yates, The Collected Stories of Richard Yates