Michelle Richmond > Quotes

“We take pictures because we can't accept that everything passes, we can't accept that the repetition of a moment is an impossibility. We wage a monotonous war against our own impending deaths, against time that turns children into that other, lesser species: adults. We take pictures because we know we will forget. We will forget the week, the day, the hour. We will forget when we were happiest. We take pictures out of pride, a desire to have the best of ourselve preserved. We fear that we will die and others will not know we lived.”
― Michelle Richmond, The Year of Fog

“...You find a way, somehow to get through the most horrible things, things you think would kill you. You find a way and you move through the days, one by one, in shock, in despair, but you move. The days pass, one after the other, and you go along with them - occasionally stunned, and not entirely relieved, to find that you are still alive.”
― Michelle Richmond, The Year of Fog

“To be a writer you have to write -- and no academic degree is going to do the writing for you. ”
― Michelle Richmond

“Some people have a gift for making you feel okay, just by the fact of their presence.”
― Michelle Richmond, The Year of Fog

“It's rather disconcerting to sit around a table in a critique of someone else's work, only to realize that the antagonist in the story is none other than yourself, and no one present thinks you're a very likable character.”
― Michelle Richmond

“I have a hunch that our obsession with photography arises from an unspoken pessimism; it is our nature to believe the good things will not last. . . But photos provide a false sense of security> like our flawed memory, they are guaranteed to fade. . . . We take photographs in order to remember, but it is in the nature of a photograph to forget (pg 157)”
― Michelle Richmond, The Year of Fog

“A story, after all, does not only belong to the one who is telling it. It belongs, in equal measure, to the one who is listening.”
― Michelle Richmond, No One You Know

“As the years progress and we experience more and more, the mini-narratives that make up our lives are distorted, corrupted, so that every one of us is left with a false history, a self-created fiction about the live we have led. pg 163”
― Michelle Richmond, The Year of Fog

“A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.”
― Michelle Richmond, The Marriage Pact

“It’s the direction the feet are pointing—not the hands—that indicates a person’s true interest.”
― Michelle Richmond, The Marriage Pact

“I hate chitchat, small talk, getting to know people in that fake way that guarantees you'll know less about them at the end of the conversation than you did at the beginning.”
― Michelle Richmond, The Marriage Pact

“I asked her to tell me what the best moment of her life had been

Did she?

Yes, she told me about a trip the two of you had taken to Europe together right after you graduated from high school.

Pascal in Paris, it had been a dream of hers to visit Pascal’s grave. On that trip she finally did. I’d never seen her so excited.

That wasn’t it.

It wasn’t?

No, it was in a hostel in Venice. The two of you had been travelling for a couple of weeks and all of your clothes were filthy. You didn’t mind the dirty clothes very much. Lila said you were able to roll with the punches and for you, everything about the trip, even the dirty laundry, was a great adventure. But Lila liked things a certain way, and she hated being dirty. That day she had gone off in search of a laundry mat but hadn’t been able to find one. You were sleeping in a room with a dozen bunks, women and men together. In the middle of the night Lila woke up and realized you weren’t in your bed. She thought you must have gone to the bathroom, but after a couple minutes when you hadn’t returned she became worried. She climbed down from her bunk and went to the bathroom to find you, you weren’t there. She wondered up and down the hallway softly calling your name. A few of the rooms were private and had the doors closed. As she became increasingly worried she began putting her ear to those doors listening for you. Then she heard banging down below. Alarmed she went down the dark stairwell to the basement. She saw you before you saw her. You were working in the dim light of a single blub standing over an old hand operated washing machine. She asked what you were doing, what does it look like you said smiling. What Lila remembered from that night was that you actually looked happy to be standing there in the cold basement in the middle of the night washing clothes by hand. And she knew you wouldn’t have minded wearing dirty clothes for another week or two, you were doing it for her.

She said that.

Yes when I asked her what the best moment of her life had been she had told me that story.

But it was nothing.

To her it was.”
― Michelle Richmond, No One You Know

“I never expected to find myself here, on the edge of the continent--childless, possibly jobless, with broken bones and a broken marriage, citizen of a broken country. But here I am, and I must make something of it. That's really the only choice one has: make something of it, or don't.”
― Michelle Richmond, Golden State

“But the past months have taught me that there is no starting over. As the narrator of Martin in Space says, "I can't unsee what I've seen, I can't unlearn what I know. Each place, each decision, each experience, has become a part of me, no more than my head, no less than my heart."

Life is a series of decisions, forks in the road, this or that, yes or no, left or right. We make our choices, we select our path. When I was young, the options seemed unlimited, so many paths to travel. But here's what I didn't understand: Every path is a one-way street. There is no turning back, no changing your mind, no trying both options. There is only forward motion. With time, your decisions pile up, compounding, interweaving, slowly turning you into the person you are.”
― Michelle Richmond, The Wonder Test

“We tend to see life as a continuum, but really, it's a series of phases, generating a series of different selves. You leave one life behind and start another. And each time, a different version of yourself emerges.”
― Michelle Richmond, Golden State

“The guilty always find a way of rationalizing their behavior, making it sound as though they’ve done you a favor.”
― Michelle Richmond, The Marriage Pact

“Tragedy, in its full and life-altering form, happened to other people.”
― Michelle Richmond, The Year of Fog

“I expected marriage to be a door that we went through. Like a new house, you step into it, expecting it to be an unchanging space to inhabit. But, of course, I was wrong. Marriage is a living, changing thing that you must tend to both alone and together It grows in all sorts of ways, both ordinary and unexpected.”
― Michelle Richmond, The Marriage Pact

“Most married couples report being happiest during their third year of marriage.”
― Michelle Richmond, The Marriage Pact

“when a woman is content in her marriage, her husband is much happier; a man’s level of satisfaction within the marriage, however, appears to have no bearing on his wife’s happiness.”
― Michelle Richmond, The Marriage Pact

“I understand how families become estranged, not by design, but by embarrassment. You come to a point when so much time has passed that it seems impossible to make the first move”
― Michelle Richmond, Golden State

“But there's no emergency kit for marriage. No neat plan you can turn to when the ground shifts beneath your feet.”
― Michelle Richmond, Golden State

“Marriage is inefficient!” she proclaims. “The whole construct is a model of wasted resources. The wife often stays home to care for the children, or even a single child, abandoning the career she worked so hard for, losing years of creative output. Beyond the wasting of talent, think of the physical waste. For every home, there are so many redundancies. How many toasters do you think there are in the world?” “I have no idea.” “Seriously, just guess.” “Ten million?” I say impatiently. “More than two hundred million! And how often do you think the average household uses its toaster?” Once again, she doesn’t wait for my answer. “Just 2.6 hours per year. Two hundred million toasters are sitting unused, statistically speaking, more than 99.97 percent of their active lives.”
― Michelle Richmond, The Marriage Pact

“Technical speaking one is a beautiful number. One is its own factorial, its own square, its own cube. It is neither a prime number nor a composite number. It is the first two numbers of the Fibonacci sequence. It is the empty product. Any number raised to the zero power is one. It might be argued that one is the most independent number known to man. It can do things no other number is capable of.”
― Michelle Richmond, No One You Know

“I already have a son

One is enough?

There was a time when I dreamt of having three or four but I rather failed one the fatherhood front didn't I? Some errors don't bear repeating.”
― Michelle Richmond, No One You Know

“Are they going to let you to make up the test?” I ask.”
― Michelle Richmond, The Wonder Test

“56 percent of learned information is forgotten within an hour of being encoded. By the time one day has passed, another 10 percent is gone. A month after the information is learned, 80 percent of it has vanished. How”
― Michelle Richmond, The Year of Fog: A Novel

“The boy is surrounded for miles on all sides by millions of scattered, dying starfish that have washed ashore with the tide. The boy is picking the starfish up and throwing them back into the water. The academic approaches and asks, “What are you doing?” And the boy tells him that the tide is going out and the starfish will die. Confused, the academic says, “But there are so many, millions even, how can it matter?” The boy leans down, picks one up, and throws it far out into the ocean. He smiles and says, “It matters for that one.”
― Michelle Richmond, The Marriage Pact

“And a bride who needs a fifty-thousand-dollar wedding, with a hairdresser and a wedding planner and a five-course meal and all the rest, is probably high-maintenance.”
― Michelle Richmond, The Marriage Pact

“The longer something remains a priority, he said, the more it becomes second nature, hardwired in our minds and actions.”
― Michelle Richmond, The Marriage Pact