Robert James Waller > Quotes

“Once a person knows a kiss and a kind word, you can't blame him for never wanting to live without them again.”
― Robert James Waller

“The human heart has a way of making itself large again even after it's been broken into a million pieces.”
― Robert James Waller, The Bridges of Madison County

“In a universe of ambiguity, this kind of certainty comes only once, and never again, no matter how many lifetimes you live.”
― Robert James Waller, The Bridges of Madison County

“The old dreams were good dreams; they didn't work out but I'm glad I had them.”
― Robert James Waller, The Bridges of Madison County

“It's clear to me now that I have been moving toward you and you toward me for a long time. Though neither of us was aware of the other before we met, there was a kind of mindless certainty bumming blithely along beneath our ignorance that ensured we would come together. Like two solitary birds flying the great prairies by celestial reckoning, all of these years and lifetimes we have been moving toward one another.”
― Robert James Waller, The Bridges of Madison County

“Analysis destroys wholes. Some things, magic things, are meant to stay whole. If you look at their pieces, they go away.”
― Robert James Waller, The Bridges Of Madison County

“And in that moment, everything I knew to be true about myself up until then was gone. I was acting like another woman, yet I was more myself than ever before.”
― Robert James Waller, The Bridges of Madison County

“The heart never forgets, never gives up, the territory marked off for those who came before.”
― Robert James Waller, The Bridges of Madison County

“Complex things are easy to do. Simplicity's the real challenge.”
― Robert James Waller, The Bridges of Madison County

“This is why I'm here on this planet, at this time, Francesca. Not to travel or make pictures, but to love you. I know that now. I have been falling from the rim of a great, high place, somewhere back in time, for many more years than I have lived in this life. And through all of those years, I have been falling toward you.”
― Robert James Waller

“I don't like feeling sorry for myself. That's not who I am. And most of the time I don't feel that way. Instead, I am grateful for having at least found you. We could have flashed by one another like two pieces of cosmic dust.

God or the universe or whatever one chooses to label the great systems of balance and order does not recognize Earth-time. To the universe, four days is no different than four billion light years. I try to keep that in mind.

But, I am, after all, a man. And all the philosophic rationalizations I can conjure up do not keep me from wanting you, every day, every moment, the merciless wail of time, of time I can never spend with you, deep within my head.

I love you, profoundly and completely. And I always will.

The last cowboy,

Robert”
― Robert James Waller, The Bridges of Madison County

“I sometimes have the feeling you've been here a long time, more than one lifetime, and that you've dwelt in private places none of the rest of us has even dreamed about.”
― Robert James Waller , The Bridges of Madison County

“So here I am walking around with another person inside of me. Though I think I put it better the day we parted when I said there is a third person we have created from the two of us. And I am stalked now by that other entity.”
― Robert James Waller, The Bridges of Madison County

“First you must have the images, then come the words.”
― Robert James Waller, The Bridges of Madison County

“There are songs that come free from the blue-eyed grass, from the dust of a thousand country roads. This is one of them.”
― Robert James Waller, The Bridges of Madison County

“Such physical matters were nice, yet, to him, intelligence and passion born of living, the ability to move and be moved by subtleties of the mind and spirit, were what really counted.”
― Robert James Waller, The Bridges of Madison County

“We have both lost ourselves and created something else, something that exists only as an interlacing of the two of us. ”
― Robert James Waller

“The road is a strange place. Shuffling along, I looked up and you were there walking across the grass toward my truck on an August day. In retrospect, it seems inevitable - it could not have been any other way-- a case of what I call the high probability of the improbable”
― Robert James Waller, The Bridges of Madison County

“When a woman makes the choice to marry, to have children, in one way her life begins but in another way it stops. You build a life of details. You become a mother, a wife and you stop and stay steady so that your children can move. And when they leave they take your life of details with them. And then you're expected to move again only you don't remember what moves you because no one has asked in so long. Not even yourself.”
― Robert James Waller

“The reality is not exactly what the song started out to be, but it's not a bad song.”
― Robert James Waller, The Bridges of Madison County

“One great love in a single lifetime was enough for anyone.”
― Robert James Waller, A Thousand Country Roads

“...realities that kept the music silent, the dreams in a box.”
― Robert James Waller, The Bridges of Madison County

“if only we lost our minds and arrived at our hearts”
― Robert James Waller

“I am the highway and a peregrine and all the sails that ever went to sea”
― Robert James Waller, The Bridges of Madison County

“He was an animal. A graceful, hard, male animal who did nothing overtly to dominate her yet dominated her completely, in the exact way she wanted that to happen at this moment.”
― Robert James Waller, The Bridges of Madison County

“Anyone who can feel that way about a woman is worth lovin himself.”
― Robert James Waller, The Bridges of Madison County

“This kind of certainty comes but once in a lifetime.”
― Robert James Waller, The Bridges of Madison County

“You make pictures, not take them?

Yes. At least that's how I think of it. That's the difference between Sunday snapshooters and someone who does it for a living... I don't just take things as given, I try to make them into something that reflects my personal consciousness, my spirit. I try to find the poetry in the image.”
― Robert James Waller, The Bridges of Madison County

“Eventually, computers and robots will run things. Humans will manage those machines, but that doesn't require courage or strength, or any characteristics like those. In fact, men are outliving their usefulness”
― Robert James Waller, The Bridges of Madison County

“Something I've never been able to adapt to, to understand is how they can lavish such love and care on the animals and then see them sold for slaughter. I don't dare say anything about it, though. Richard and his friends would be down on me in a flash. But there's some kind of cold, unfeeling contradiction in that business.”
― Robert James Waller, The Bridges of Madison County