Nobody's Fool Quotes

“I'm about to fuck up, he thought clearly, and his next thought was, but I don't have to. This was followed closely by a third thought, the last of this familiar sequence, which was, but I'm going to anyway.”
― Richard Russo, Nobody's Fool

“It was a scary thought. A man could be surrounded by poetry reading and not know it.”
― Richard Russo, Nobody's Fool

“For fairness and loyalty, however important to the head, were issues that could seldom be squared in the human heart, at the deepest depths of which lay the mystery of affection, of love, which you either felt or you didn't, pure as instinct, which seized you, not the other way around, making a mockery of words like "should" and "ought". The human heart, where compromise could not be struck, not ever. Where transgressions exacted a terrible price. Where tangled black limbs fell. Where the boom got lowered.”
― Richard Russo, Nobody's Fool

“We wear the chains we forge in life,”
― Richard Russo, Nobody's Fool

“An imperfect human heart, perfectly shattered, was her conclusion. A condition so common as to be virtually universal, rendering issues of right and wrong almost incidental.”
― Richard Russo, Nobody's Fool

“I must be losing patience with my fellow humans," Miss Beryl went on. "Anymore I'm all for executing people who are mean to children. I used to favor just cutting off their feet. Now I want to rid the world of them completely. If this keeps up I'll be voting Republican soon.”
― Richard Russo, Nobody's Fool

“Everybody looked at Sully suspiciously. A rumor that he had burned up in the blaze had been circulating, and people had quickly adjusted to the idea of profound human tragedy. They were reluctant to give it up, Sully could tell. He smiled apologetically at the crowd.”
― Richard Russo, Nobody's Fool

“No, Sully'd decided long ago to abstain from all but the most general forms of regret. He allowed himself the vague wish that things had turned out differently, without blaming himself that they hadn't, any more than he'd blamed himself when his 1-2-3 triple never ran like it should at least once. It didn't pay to second-guess every one of life's decisions, to pretend to wisdom about the past from the safety of the present, the way so many people did when they got older.”
― Richard Russo, Nobody's Fool

“Throughout his life a case study underachiever, Sully—people still remarked—was nobody’s fool, a phrase that Sully no doubt appreciated without ever sensing its literal application—that at sixty, he was divorced from his own wife, carrying on halfheartedly with another man’s, estranged from his son, devoid of self-knowledge, badly crippled and virtually unemployable—all of which he stubbornly confused with independence.”
― Richard Russo, Nobody's Fool

“Miss Beryl: Doesn't it bother you that you haven't done more with the life God gave you?
Sully: Not often. Now and then.”
― Richard Russo, Nobody's Fool

“Since her retirement from teaching Miss Beryl's health had in many respects greatly improved, despite her advancing years. An eighth-grade classroom was an excellent place to snag whatever was in the air in the way of illness. Also depression, which, Miss Beryl believed, in conjunction with guilt, opened the door to illness. Miss Beryl didn't know any teachers who weren't habitually guilty and depressed--guilty they hadn't accomplished more with their students, depressed that very little more was possible.”
― Richard Russo, Nobody's Fool

“Perfect silence. This in response to Sully's key being turned in the ignition of the pickup.”
― Richard Russo, Nobody's Fool

“One of the unfortunate side effects of teaching for forty years was that the task was so monumental, even in recollection, that it sometimes seemed you’d tried to teach everyone on the planet. What Miss Beryl looked for in each adult face was the evidence of some failed lesson in some distant yesterday that might predict incompetence today.”
― Richard Russo, Nobody's Fool

“Hell, at twenty, he’d been ready to junk everything and start over too. But now, at sixty, he was less willing to throw things away that could be patched together and kept running for a few more months. He wanted to keep going forward, not stop and turn around and analyze the validity of decisions made and courses charted long ago.”
― Richard Russo, Nobody's Fool

“Like many men addicted to sports, Clive Sr. was also a religious man.”
― Richard Russo, Nobody's Fool

“The nurse who came in to take her blood was the same one who’d taken her blood pressure earlier, and she slapped the flesh on Miss Beryl’s arm with some annoyance, as if she’d have preferred it to assume some other shape. Miss Beryl knew just how the woman felt.”
― Richard Russo, Nobody's Fool

“There was something about educated people that made it impossible for them to admit when they didn’t understand something.”
― Richard Russo, Nobody's Fool

“Maybe sheetrocking wasn't one of Sully's favorite jobs, but like most physical labor, there was a rhythm to it that you could find if you cared to look, and once you found this rhythm it'd get you through a morning. Rhythm was what Sully had counted on over the long years - that and the wisdom to understand that no job, no matter how thankless or stupid or backbreaking, could not be gotten through. The clock moved if you let it.”
― Richard Russo, Nobody's Fool

“No, Sully'd decided long ago to abstain from all but the most general forms of regret. He allowed himself the vague wish that things had turned out differently, without blaming himself that they hadn't, any more than he'd blamed himself when his 1-2-3 triple never ran like it should at least once. It didn't pay to second-guess every one of life's decisions, to pretend to wisdom about the past from the safety of the present, the way so many people did when they got older. As if, given a second chance to live their lives, they'd be smarter. Sully didn't know too many people who got noticeably smarter over the course of a lifetime. Some made fewer mistakes, but in Sully's opinion that was because they couldn't go quite so fast. They had less energy, no more virtue; fewer opportunities to screw up, not more wisdom. It was Sully's policy to stick by his mistakes....”
― Richard Russo, Nobody's Fool

“Also her perfume, which mingled with the crisp air off the lake below, creating an intoxicating mixture of damp earth and leaves and water and girl. Not woman, in Sully’s opinion. Girl.”
― Richard Russo, Nobody's Fool

“probably horse doo had a name in french also, but that didn't mean god intended for you to eat it.”
― Richard Russo, Nobody's Fool

“The graceful merging of his days was either depressing or reassuring, depending upon his mood. Even now, at age sixty, he couldn’t imagine feeling finished in the way that the OTB men were, or of being on the brink of anything new.”
― Richard Russo, Nobody's Fool

“There were two naked people sitting at the table, though it took Sully’s grandson Will a moment to realize this because, in the center of the table, in addition to a pile of crumpled money, was a mound of clothing and a revolver and, most startling to Will, the lower half of a leg, standing up straight. The leg wore a shoe, a brown wing tip, and a sock, argyle, and above the sock the leg was pink, the color of Will’s own skin when his mother or Grandma Vera drew his bathwater too hot and he’d stayed in it too long. Near the top of the limb was what looked like some sort of complex harness. Because he was busy trying to account for this leg, he didn’t immediately notice the two naked people. “Oh,”
― Richard Russo, Nobody's Fool

“Clearly, having been wrong had no effect on the boy, who looked no less put upon. He was at an emotional age where he was right by definition, because other people were stupid. There existed no proof to the contrary.”
― Richard Russo, Nobody's Fool

“Still, it was tempting to tell him to quit looking at the scratch. It hadn’t changed or gotten worse since the last time he’d examined it. The thing to do with wounds was ignore them, like your hole cards in a game of stud poker, which also never changed, no matter how many times you looked at them. Like Sully’s knee, which he allowed himself to examine once, first thing in the morning, and which he then ignored the rest of the day. Like all the mistakes a man made in his life, which could be worried and picked at like scabs but were better left alone.”
― Richard Russo, Nobody's Fool

“Miss Beryl, with Clive Sr.’s star athlete for an audience, seemed actually to be arguing that government, law, even God’s own church were not always worthy of respect. In Clive Sr.’s view, if these were seriously questioned, how long would it be before football coaches came under attack as well?”
― Richard Russo, Nobody's Fool

“Do we ever know as deeply as we know in childhood? Does adult life amount to anything more than a futile attempt to invalidate the deepest truths we know about ourselves and our world?”
― Richard Russo, Nobody's Fool

“Some phrases were truly magical in their ability to dredge up the past from the bottom of life’s lake, and for Sully, like all errant fathers, “Don’t tell your mother” was such a phrase. He hadn’t used it in about thirty years. But the words were right there, anxious to be spoken again after so long, a holy incantation. It was the phrase he’d been born to speak,”
― Richard Russo, Nobody's Fool

“Sully understood this to be true, though it was a fairly recent phenomenon. Ruth had witnessed and reported it with considerable irritation. It couldn’t have been the case when he was married to Vera, because his wife had kept a careful, detailed list of the things he did of which she disapproved, and she was not the sort of woman to hold anything back. She surely would have mentioned it if he’d slept with his eyes open.”
― Richard Russo, Nobody's Fool

“This was what Miss Beryl had been coming back to, all day, all her life probably, to the mystery of affection, of the heart inclining in one direction and not another, of its unexpected, unwished-for pirouettes, its ability to make a fool, a villain, of its owner, if indeed any human can be said to own his heart. “I know this,” she’d told Clive Sr. that long-ago afternoon. “Love is a stupid thing.”
― Richard Russo, Nobody's Fool