Richard Russo > Quotes

“Ultimately, your theme will find you. You don't have to go looking for it.”
― Richard Russo

“And there comes a time in your life when you realize that if you don't take the opportunity to be happy, you may never get another chance again.”
― Richard Russo, Empire Falls

“What if all everybody needed in the world was to be sure of one friend? What if you were the one, and you refused to say those simple words?”
― Richard Russo, Empire Falls

“After all, what was the whole wide world but a place for people to yearn for their heart's impossible desires, for those desires to become entrenched in defiance of logic, plausibility, and even the passage of time, as eternal as polished marble. ”
― Richard Russo, Empire Falls

“Not giving a shit, she decided, is like the defrost option on a car's heater that miraculously unfogs the windshield, allowing you to see where you're headed.”
― Richard Russo, Empire Falls

“People sometimes get in the habit of being loyal to a mistake.”
― Richard Russo, Mohawk

“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

“Which is why we have spouses and children and parents and colleagues and friends, because someone has to know us better than we know ourselves. We need them to tell us. We need them to say, "I know you, Al. You are not the kind of man who.”
― Richard Russo, Straight Man

“I'll tell you one thing, though. It's a terrible thing to be a disappointment to a good woman.”
― Richard Russo

“What I discovered I liked best about striking out on my bicycle was that the farther I got from home, the more interesting and unusual my thoughts became.”
― Richard Russo

“Have you ever noticed that when people use the expression 'I have to say', what follows usually needn't be said?”
― Richard Russo, Bridge of Sighs

“The line of gray along the horizon is brighter now, and with the coming light I feel a certainty: that there is, despite our wild imaginings, only one life. The ghostly others, no matter how real they seem, no matter how badly we need them, are phantoms. The one life we're left with is sufficient to fill and refill our imperfect hearts with joy, and then to shatter them. And it never, ever lets up.”
― Richard Russo, Bridge of Sighs

“The other possibility was that there was no right thing to say, that the choice wasn't between right and wrong but between wrong, more wrong, and as wrong as you can get.”
― Richard Russo, Empire Falls

“My God, he couldn't help thinking, how terrible it is to be that age, to have emotions so near the surface that the slightest turbulence causes them to boil over. That, very simply, was what adulthood must be all about -- acquiring the skill to bury things more deeply. Out of sight and, whenever possible, out of mind.”
― Richard Russo, Empire Falls

“As I drift back into sleep, I can't help thinking that it's a wonderful thing to be right about the world. To weigh the evidence, always incomplete, and correctly intuit the whole, to see the world in a grain of sand, to recognize its beauty, its simplicity, its truth. It's as close as we get to God in this life, and reside in the glow of such brief flashes of understanding, fully awake, sometimes for two or three seconds, at peace with our existence. And then back to sleep we go.”
― Richard Russo, Straight Man

“Truth be told, I'm not an easy man. I can be an entertaining one, though it's been my experience that most people don't want to be entertained. They want to be comforted. And, of course, my idea of entertaining might not be yours. I'm in complete agreement with all those people who say, regarding movies, 'I just want to be entertained.' This populist position is much derided by my academic colleagues as simpleminded and unsophisticated, evidence of questionable analytical and critical acuity. But I agree with the premise, and I too just want to be entertained. That I am almost never entertained by what entertains other people who just want to be entertained doesn't make us philosophically incompatible. It just means that we shouldn't go to movies together.”
― Richard Russo, Straight Man

“Just because things happen slow doesn't mean you'll be ready for them. If they happened fast, you'd be alert for all kinds of suddenness, aware that speed was trump. "Slow" works in an altogether different principle, on the deceptive impression that there's plenty of time to prepare, which conceals the central fact, that no matter how slow things go, you'll always be slower.”
― Richard Russo, Empire Falls

“They stayed, many of them, because staying was easier and less scary than leaving,”
― Richard Russo, Empire Falls

“That afternoon I came to understand that one of the deepest purposes of intellectual sophistication is to provide distance between us and our most disturbing personal truths and gnawing fears.”
― Richard Russo, Straight Man

“To expect reason is where the fallacy lies.”
― Richard Russo, Straight Man

“Don't even the best and most fortunate of lives hint at other possibilities, at a different kind of sweetness and, yes, bitterness too? Isn't this why we can't help feeling cheated, even when we know we haven't been?”
― Richard Russo, Bridge of Sighs

“One of the odd things about middle age, he concluded, was the strange decisions a man discovers he's made by not really making them, like allowing friends to drift away through simple neglect.”
― Richard Russo

“To his surprise, she leaned over and kissed him on the forehead, a kiss so full of affection that it dispelled the awkwardness, even as it caused Miles' heart to plummet, because all kisses are calibrated, and this one revealed the great chasm between affection and love.”
― Richard Russo, Empire Falls

“In the end it all came down to companionship, to friendship, to sacrifice, to compromise.”
― Richard Russo, Bridge of Sighs

“It pleased him to imagine God as someone like his mother, someone beleagured by too many responsibilities, too dog-tired to monitor an energetic boy every minute of the day, but who, out of love and fear for his safety, checked in on him whenever she could. Was this so crazy? ...Miles liked the idea of a God who, when He at last had the oppotunity to return His attention to His children, might shake His head with wonder and mutter, "Jesus. Look what they're up to now." A distractible God, perhaps, one who'd be startled to discover so many of His children way up in trees since the last time He looked. A God whose hand would go rushing to His mouth in fear in that instant of recognition that - good God! - that kid's going to hurt himself. A God who could be surprised by unanticipated pride - glory be, that boy is a climber!”
― Richard Russo, Empire Falls

“The world is divided between kids who grow up wanting to be their parents and those like us, who grow up wanting to be anything but. Neither group ever succeeds.”
― Richard Russo, Straight Man

“I’ve always known that there’s more going on inside me than finds its way into the world, but this is probably true of everyone. Who doesn’t regret that he isn’t more fully understood?”
― Richard Russo, Bridge of Sighs

“To his surprise he also discovered that it was possible to be good at what you had little interest in, just as it had been possible to be bad at something, whether painting or poetry, that you cared about a great deal.”
― Richard Russo

“The sad, fucking truth was that no matter who you are, you never, ever, get your fill.”
― Richard Russo, Empire Falls

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