Be Mine Quotes

“The pain of being left exposed to the fact that you are only, only, only helplessly yourself. The closest anyone can go with us”
― Richard Ford, Be Mine: A Frank Bascombe Novel

“I gave a thought to travel. Though the problem with travel is eventually you arrive—with your old self lagging behind a few hours or nights or days, and finally catching up with all the same shit on his mind—at which point all you can do is travel on to someplace else.”
― Richard Ford, Be Mine

“It’s widely acknowledged that people live longer and stay happier the more stuff they can forget or ignore.”
― Richard Ford, Be Mine

“of the life that’s passed and what parts might still be for the taking”
― Richard Ford, Be Mine

“wisenheimer”
― Richard Ford, Be Mine

“I’ve reached the point in life at which no woman I’m ever going to be attracted to is ever going to be attracted to me—so the sky’s the limit? That for much longer than my son’s been sick, I’ve occasionally waked—as always, at 2:46 a.m., the precise hour of my birth—and wondered: How do you stand it, these dismal facts of life, without some durable fantasy or deception or dissembling?”
― Richard Ford, Be Mine

“Don’t be an extension”—a conspirator’s smile—“of the someone else’s dying. This can be a form of,” (You guessed it.) “sublimated selfishness.”
― Richard Ford, Be Mine

“An optimist, I’ve read, is a person who believes the inevitable is what’s supposed to happen.”
― Richard Ford, Be Mine

“you’re the one doing the confessing, but returns diminish when you’re sitting silently fuming about how none of this shit matches your situation, and planning all you’re going to say when it’s your turn, while pretending to listen, “be supportive,” and not seem angry when how can you not be.”
― Richard Ford, Be Mine

“Haddam has always sheltered oddments like Paul, strangies you get used to seeing hanging around the Post Office or the newspaper kiosk, or at back tables in the library, reading China Today or Lancet and laughing about things only they know. These people wear the same clothes day-in, day-out, always appear fiercely involved in something, though in fact they’re doing nothing, since in an hour you see them involved in the same thing a block away. They are (or were) the love-child son or moody eldest daughter of some ex–New Jersey governor, long deceased, or the sallow, hollow-eyed offspring of some Swiss seminarian, who’s moved on. These aren’t the people who buy bump stocks or take up positions in a bell tower and rain terror upon an innocent world. They’re the watery presences at the periphery of yours and everyone else’s sight line, awaiting nothing, seemingly friendless (though not always), harming nothing and no one, growing old as you grow old, and who repair somewhere at night to sleep. It’s possible to think people like this don’t have lives full of expectancy and small triumphs. But they do.”
― Richard Ford, Be Mine

“she occasionally called me late at night, half-looped, to tell me I was a “luminous” man but never seemed to need her and never “gave” enough. Which was why she preferred grieving people whose language she didn’t speak. (These people apparently give a lot.) I actually did need her, and would be happy if she’d come back today. Only I thought—and still think—that defeating need is the secret to being in love, and that most of the time “giving” was code for people wanting you to care more than they do.”
― Richard Ford, Be Mine

“What I wanted them to know, though, was that understanding, making sense, knowing the meaning of anything had to do with fitting together loose pieces of life that don’t fit together, then making a new whole out of the newly unified shards. The white whale meant what you could marshal evidence and make it mean. This was what all scientific discoveries, all philosophy, all great novels do—I believed. Making sense is everlastingly a process of jiggering and re-jiggering and re-re-rejiggering. It’s by nature provisional, and pretty soon you trade it in on something better.”
― Richard Ford, Be Mine