Between Them Quotes

“entering the past is a precarious business, since the past strives but always half-fails to make us who we are.”
― Richard Ford, Between Them: Remembering My Parents – An Exploration of Memory, Intimacy, and Parental Love

“life’s most important moments are often barely noticed by others, if noticed at all.”
― Richard Ford, Between Them: Remembering My Parents – An Exploration of Memory, Intimacy, and Parental Love

“The persuasive power of normal life is extravagant. To accept less than life when less is not overwhelmingly upon you is—at least for some—unacceptable.”
― Richard Ford, Between Them: Remembering My Parents – An Exploration of Memory, Intimacy, and Parental Love

“But if I had to I would say that because I was his son, I can recognize now that life is short and has inadequacies, that once again it requires crucial avoidances as well as fillings-in to be acceptable.”
― Richard Ford, Between Them: Remembering My Parents – An Exploration of Memory, Intimacy, and Parental Love

“Our parents’ lives, even those enfolded in obscurity, offer us our first, strong assurance that human events have consequence. Here we are, after all.”
― Richard Ford, Between Them: Remembering My Parents – An Exploration of Memory, Intimacy, and Parental Love

“In the thirties, after they were married, they lived simply and only for each other and for the day. They drank some, lived on the road with my father’s salesman’s job. They had a good time and felt they had little to look back on, and didn’t look.”
― Richard Ford, Between Them: Remembering My Parents – An Exploration of Memory, Intimacy, and Parental Love

“Greater challenges might only have frustrated him and rendered him unhappy.”
― Richard Ford, Between Them: Remembering My Parents – An Exploration of Memory, Intimacy, and Parental Love

“Together—though perhaps only together—they were fully formed. They stayed on the road. Life went on as it had, from the thirties straight into the forties. They owned little—a bit of furniture, their clothes, no car.”
― Richard Ford, Between Them: Remembering My Parents – An Exploration of Memory, Intimacy, and Parental Love

“Of her mother there is more to say -- a story. She was from that same north Arkansas backwoods and had sisters and brothers. There was rumored to be Osage blood -- oil-well Indians who'd lost it all.”
― Richard Ford, Between Them: Remembering My Parents – An Exploration of Memory, Intimacy, and Parental Love

“John Ruskin wrote that composition is the arrangement of unequal things.”
― Richard Ford, Between Them: Remembering My Parents – An Exploration of Memory, Intimacy, and Parental Love

“mystery about life—the mystery which promises that even with careful notice, much happens that we do not understand.”
― Richard Ford, Between Them: Remembering My Parents – An Exploration of Memory, Intimacy, and Parental Love

“What they talked about and what was in the air was only the present, interrupted by the long times between Monday and Friday. These absences made their closeness to each other even more paramount, since together was where they’d always, only been.”
― Richard Ford, Between Them: Remembering My Parents – An Exploration of Memory, Intimacy, and Parental Love