Richard Lange > Quotes

“I like the way we talk to each other. It feels honest. It was different with Manuel. One of us always had to win. Husbands and wives do that, worry more about being right than being truthful.”
― Richard Lange

“Being nothing special is nothing special.”
― Richard Lange, Sweet Nothing

“His desolation is as beautiful as a broken mirror.”
― Richard Lange

“Back then it felt like life was not just one thing; it could be other things. Then one day it felt like the exact opposite; life was one thing and one thing only, a wait.”
― Richard Lange

“She always claimed to have me figured out. 'You think you can follow someone to get somewhere, but don't nobody you know where the hell they're going either.”
― Richard Lange

“She turns and waves, and the morning of another terrible day creeps up on us like a thug with a lead pipe.”
― Richard Lange, Sweet Nothing

“The days fly by, but the hours drag on forever.”
― richard lange, Sweet Nothing

“The fewer corpses in the street, the better, Petty decided. He hooked Hug under the arms, and Carrie took his feet. They half carried, half dragged him to the Range Rover and wrestled him into the backseat.”
― Richard Lange, The Smack

“He'd come to no conclusions by dawn but was cheered nonetheless by the start of the new day, the rosy reappearance of the world being a wonder that never failed to sweep away his gloom and fill his sails with enough wind to get him moving.”
― Richard Lange, Sweet Nothing

“For one weird instant Thacker feels as hollow as a dead steer he came upon the other day, a sun-bleached hide stretched taut over a cage of bones. The wind races through his emptiness like it did through the carcass, the moan it makes coming dangerously close to thickening into a message.”
― Richard Lange, Angel Baby

“This psychologist, Maslow, came up with this pyramid—well, more like a ladder. Give me a pen, I’ll draw it. Down here on the first level are the basics: food, water, shelter. On the second level are financial security and personal safety. Next level, here, you’ve got relationships: your friends and family, your wife or girlfriend. Then we come to level four, your esteem needs, when you feel good about your accomplishments and you’re satisfied with yourself. At the top, up here, the tip of the pyramid, is self-actualization. That’s where you realize your full potential as a human being. Now, the deal is, you start at the bottom of the pyramid and work your way up. You have to satisfy your needs at each level in order to free up the mental space that’ll allow you to advance to the next level, and if you skip any levels, you’ll never attain true self-actualization.”
― Richard Lange, Joe Hustle: A Novel

“I can tell she also has only a vague recollection of who I am, and I feel as if I'm disappearing from the past and the present at the same time, like an old photograph in which the people have faded into ghostly blurs.”
― Richard Lange, Sweet Nothing

“Those of us in pain are sensitive to pain in others.”
― Richard Lange, Rovers

“He’d recently turned forty, and this fact caromed inside his head when he stared at the cigarette burn on his room’s garish polyester bedspread, ate a dollar hot dog for dinner, washed his underwear in the sink, and got hung up on by widows from Des Moines.”
― Richard Lange, The Smack

“The right woman can work miracles. I've seen beasts tamed and crooked made straight. But in order for that to happen, you have to be the right man, and I've never been anybody's idea of right.”
― Richard Lange