Richard Ford > Quotes

“Some people want to be bank presidents. Other people want to rob banks.”
― Richard Ford

“What's friendship's realest measure?
I'll tell you. The amount of precious time you'll squander on someone else's calamities and fuck-ups.”
― Richard Ford

“People surprise you, Frank, with just how fuckin stupid they are.”
― Richard Ford, The Sportswriter

“If you lose all hope, you can always find it again.”
― Richard Ford, The Sportswriter

“What was our life like? I almost don't remember now. Though I remember it, the space of time it occupied. And I remember it fondly.”
― Richard Ford, The Sportswriter

“A sad fact, of course, about adult life is that you see the very things you'll never adapt to coming toward you on the horizon. You see them as the problems they are, you worry like hell about them, you make provisions, take precautions, fashion adjustments; you tell yourself you'll have to change your way of doing things. Only you don't. You can't. Somehow it's already too late. And maybe it's even worse than that: maybe the thing you see coming from far away is not the real thing, the thing that scares you, but its aftermath. And what you've feared will happen has already taken place. This is similar in spirit to the realization that all the great new advances of medical science will have no benefit for us at all, thought we cheer them on, hope a vaccine might be ready in time, think things could still get better. Only it's too late there too. And in that very way our life gets over before we know it. We miss it. And like the poet said: The ways we miss our lives are life.”
― Richard Ford

“Then, what's the matter?' I wonder, in fact, how many times I have said that or something equal to it to a woman passing palely through my life. What're you thinking? What's made you so quiet? You seem suddenly different. What's the matter? Love me is what this means, of course. Or at least, second best: surrender. Or at the very least, take some time regaling me with why you won't, and maybe by the end you will.”
― Richard Ford, The Sportswriter

“Things you did. Things you never did. Things you dreamed. After a long time they run together.”
― Richard Ford, Canada

“You're only good if you can do bad and decide not to.”
― Richard Ford, Canada

“Find what causes a commotion in your heart. Find a way to write about that”
― Richard Ford

“I know you can dream your way through an otherwise fine life, and never wake up, which is what I almost did.”
― Richard Ford, The Sportswriter

“the worst thing about regret is that it makes you duck the chance of new regret, just as you get a glimmer that nothing is worth doing unless it has the potential to fuck up your whole life.”
― Richard Ford, Independence Day

“Life's passed along to us empty. We have to make up the happiness part.”
― Richard Ford, Canada

“Our ex-wifes always harbour secrets about us that make them irresistable. Until, of course, we remember who we are and what we did and why we are not married anymore.”
― Richard Ford, The Lay of the Land

“Tweet, tweet, you're alive, you ignorant asshole.”
― Richard Ford

“Humans generally get out the gist of what they need to say right at the beginning, then spend forever qualifying, contradicting, burnishing or taking important things back. Yor rareley miss anything by cutting most people off after two sentences.”
― Richard Ford, The Lay of the Land

“Your life doesn't mean what you have or what you get. It's what you're willing to give up.”
― Richard Ford, Wildlife

“Some idiotic things are well worth doing.”
― Richard Ford, Independence Day

“Maturity, as I conceived it, was recognizing what was bad or peculiar in life, admitting it has to stay that way, and going ahead with the best of things. ”
― Richard Ford, The Sportswriter

“
If loneliness is the disease, the story is the cure.
”
― Richard Ford

“Most things don't stay the way they are very long.”
― Richard Ford, Canada

“He needed me to do what sons do for their fathers: bear witness that they’re substantial, that they’re not hollow, not ringing absences. That they count for something when little else seems to.”
― Richard Ford, Canada

“What I know is, you have a better chance in life-of surviving it-if you tolerate loss well;manage not to be a cynic through it all;...
to connect the unequal things into a whole that preserves the good,even if the good is not simple to find. We try, as my sister said. We try.”
― Richard Ford, Canada

“They may already know too much about their mother and father--nothing being more factual than divorce, where so much has to be explained and worked through intelligently (though they have tried to stay equable). I've noticed this is often the time when children begin calling their parents by their first names, becoming little ironists after their parents' faults. What could be lonelier for a parent than to be criticized by his child on a first-name basis?”
― Richard Ford, The Sportswriter

“She was an artist. She held opposites in her mind.”
― Richard Ford, Canada

“Someone ... tell us what's important, because we no longer know.”
― Richard Ford, A Multitude of Sins

“At the exact moment any decision seems to be being made, it's usually long after the real decision was actually made--like light we see emitted from stars.”
― Richard Ford, The Lay of the Land

“Real mystery - the very reason to read (and certainly write) any book - was to them a thing to dismantle, distill and mine out into rubble they could tyrannize into sorry but more permanent explanations; monuments to themselves, in other words. In my view all teachers should be required to stop teaching at age thirty-two and not allowed to resume until they're sixty-five, so that they can live their lives, not teach them away - live lives full of ambiguity and transience and regret and wonder, be asked to explain nothing in public until very near the end when they can't do anything else.
Explaining is where we all get into trouble.”
― Richard Ford, The Sportswriter

“Loneliness, I've read, is like being in a long line, waiting to reach the front where it's promised something good will happen. Only the line never moves, and other people are always coming in ahead of you, and the front, the place where you want to be, is always farther and farther away until you no longer believe it has anything to offer you.”
― Richard Ford, Canada

“All we really want is to get to the point where the past can explain nothing about us and we can get on with life.”
― Richard Ford, The Sportswriter