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Top Richard Russo Quotes

Browse top 108 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Richard Russo.

Favorite Richard Russo Quotes

1. "Miles smiled. "Can you keep a secret?"Bea snorted. "Did I tell you what you were in for if you married my daughter?""No," Miles conceded."Well, then," she said, as if that settled the matter." ~ Richard Russo
2. "To weigh and evaluate a vast grid of information, much of it meaningless, and to arrive at sensible, if erroneous, conclusions, is a skill not to be sneezed at." ~ Richard Russo
3. "I think that if people are instructed about anything, it should be about the nature of cruelty. And about why people behave so cruelly to each other. And what kind of satisfactions they derive from it. And why there is always a cost, and a price to be paid." ~ Richard Russo
4. "A short story is something that I think can be intuited and envisioned and held in your mind almost at once." ~ Richard Russo
5. "Movies have to handle time very efficiently. They're about stringing scenes together in the present. Novels aren't necessarily about that." ~ Richard Russo
6. "That man truly loathes you," Herbert says when he's sure Rourke isn't coming back. "I don't think so," I smile. "I just give his life focus, that's all." ~ Richard Russo
7. "His carefully calculated sincerity is almost entirely indistinguishable from the real thing." ~ Richard Russo
8. "...aware, as always, that the truth isn't much of substitute for a good answer." ~ Richard Russo
9. "If you paid me for work," continued Max, whose rhetoric was more sophisticated than you might expect from a man with food in his beard, "I wouldn't have to feel worthless. There's not law says old people have to feel worthless all the while, you know. You paid me, I'd have some dignity."Now it was Mile's turn to nod and smile agreeably. "I think the dignity ship set sail a long time ago, Dad." ~ Richard Russo
10. "I must be losing patience with my fellow humans," Miss Beryl went on. "Anymore I'm all for executing people who are mean to children. I used to favor just cutting off their feet. Now I want to rid the world of them completely. If this keeps up I'll be voting Republican soon." ~ Richard Russo
11. "Though here his voice faltered, because he knew as well as she did what came next, what words came next. If he could speak them, he might even convince her they were true, as his father had convinced his mother that Browning summer. It was the worst lie there was, imprisoning and ultimately embittering the hearer, playing upon her terrible need to believe. He could feel the I love you forming on his lips. Would he have said it if she hadn't interrupted?" ~ Richard Russo
12. "An imperfect human heart, perfectly shattered, was her conclusion. A condition so common as to be virtually universal, rendering issues of right and wrong almost incidental." ~ Richard Russo
13. "For fairness and loyalty, however important to the head, were issues that could seldom be squared in the human heart, at the deepest depths of which lay the mystery of affection, of love, which you either felt or you didn't, pure as instinct, which seized you, not the other way around, making a mockery of words like "should" and "ought". The human heart, where compromise could not be struck, not ever. Where transgressions exacted a terrible price. Where tangled black limbs fell. Where the boom got lowered." ~ Richard Russo
14. "Straight Man: "But my daughter belongs to a talk show generation that seems to be losing the ability to discriminate between public and private woes." ~ Richard Russo
15. "They're around back," she calls down when Julie and I get out. "Planning their strategy." "Good for them," I say, confident that no strategy that isn't grounded in chaos theory is likely to work against a man like me." ~ Richard Russo
16. "The drive back to the Mid-fucking-west was always brutal, his parents barely speaking to each other, as if suddenly recalling last year's infidelities, or maybe contemplating whom they'd settle for this year. Sex, if you went by Griffin's parents, definitely took a backseat to real estate on the passion gauge." ~ Richard Russo
17. "Perfect silence. This in response to Sully's key being turned in the ignition of the pickup." ~ Richard Russo
18. "He wasn't always trying to say witty things, and when he did say them, he felt no need to repeat them for changing company." ~ Richard Russo
19. "Miss Beryl: Doesn't it bother you that you haven't done more with the life God gave you?Sully: Not often. Now and then." ~ Richard Russo
20. "Miles couldn't help admiring women for their ability to dismiss the evidence of their senses. If that's what explained it. If it wasn't simply that from time to time they were unaccountably drawn to the grotesque." ~ Richard Russo
21. "He clearly regarded finding the glove compartment locked now as a disappointing development. Like arriving someplace for dinner, assuming you'd be welcome, and finding your place setting in the cupboard." ~ Richard Russo
22. "...he had to comfort himself with the firm conviction that most of what he objected to in Mohawk and the world at large was not the result of people reading the wrong books, but rather of not reading any at all." ~ Richard Russo
23. "Alas, he himself was a man too easily encouraged, too completely seduced by hope, only to be devastated by disappointment. He'd been born to privilege, conditioned to expect things would go well, and pathetically unable to cope once they started to go wrong." ~ Richard Russo
24. "Whereas some people's attitude suggested that perhaps they knew something you didn't, Mrs. Whiting's implied that she knew everything you didn't. She alone had been paying attention, so it was her duty to bring you at least partially up to speed." ~ Richard Russo
25. "...he was pouring vinegar onto the hot grill, where it sputtered and foamed and hissed. The air was full of it for a few seconds, enough to get everyone at the counter teared up, but just as quickly it was gone, with an implicit promise that anything so intensely horrible would be design pass swiftly." ~ Richard Russo
26. "Odd that the future should be so difficult to bring into focus when the past, uninvited, offered itself up so easily for inspection." ~ Richard Russo
27. "- You get more misanthropic every day.- I get older every day. My experience of human nature gets wider and deeper." ~ Richard Russo
28. "She looked like a woman who had spent her whole life waiting in line." ~ Richard Russo
29. "My afternoon comp class is not persuaded. In fact, they feel ill-treated...I've read three short essays aloud, anonymously, for the purpose of inspiring discussion or, failing discussion, private misgiving. It's my hope that if the majority of these intellectually addled young folk actually hear their words aloud, if they are forced to digest not only their advice to me but the logic that led to this advice, they will, if not change their minds, at least become acquainted with doubt." ~ Richard Russo
30. "It was hard to imagine him in love. I knew that he and my mother must have once felt passion, since that was what love entailed, but I was grateful that over time the madness had evolved into something more like friendship or a business partnership, something I myself could be an integral part of. Even seeing my father recollect passion was disconcerting." ~ Richard Russo
31. "Late middle age, he was coming to understand, was a time of life when everything was predictable and yet somehow you failed to see any of it coming." ~ Richard Russo
32. "People actually seemed to enjoy recalling that on a Saturday afternoon forty years ago Empire Avenue was bustling with people and cars and commerce, whereas now, of course, you could strafe it with automatic weapons and not harm a soul." ~ Richard Russo
33. "Slow, tick decides. Thinks happen slow. she isn't quite sure why this understanding of the world's movement should be important, but she thinks it is. ...Take her parents- At the time, their separation had seemed a bolt from the blue, though she now realizes it had been a slow process, rooted in dissatisfaction and need....Mybe" ~ Richard Russo
34. "Was anything in the world truer than that intuitive leap of the heart?" ~ Richard Russo
35. "I don't tell you this story today in order to encourage all of you in the class of '04 to find careers in the music business, but rather to suggest what the next decade of your lives is likely to be about, and that is, trying to ensure that you don't wake up at 32 or 35 or 40 tenured to a life that happened to you when you weren't paying strict attention, either because the money was good, or it made your parents proud, or because you were unlucky enough to discover an aptitude for the very thing that bores you to tears, or for any of the other semi-valid reasons people marshal to justify allowing the true passion of their lives to leak away. If you're lucky, you may have more than one chance to get things right, but second and third chances, like second and third marriages, can be dicey propositions, and they don't come with guarantees.... The question then is this: How does a person keep from living the wrong life?" ~ Richard Russo
36. "Everybody looked at Sully suspiciously. A rumor that he had burned up in the blaze had been circulating, and people had quickly adjusted to the idea of profound human tragedy. They were reluctant to give it up, Sully could tell. He smiled apologetically at the crowd." ~ Richard Russo
37. "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
38. "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
39. "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
40. "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
41. "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
42. "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
43. "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
44. "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
45. "They stayed, many of them, because staying was easier and less scary than leaving," ~ Richard Russo
46. "I can be glib and truthful all at once." ~ Richard Russo
47. "I suppose all writers worry about the well running dry." ~ Richard Russo
48. "I think the darker aspect of my fiction-or anybody's fiction-is by its very nature somehow easier to talk about." ~ Richard Russo
49. "If you work at comedy too laboriously, you can kill what's funny in the joke." ~ Richard Russo
50. "Not everyone writes well from a child's point of view." ~ Richard Russo
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Today's Quote

Pity speaks to grief More sweetly than a band of instruments."
Author: Bryan Procter

What Did Richard Russo Talk About?

Thin
Ear
Hey
Hen
Here
Con
Wit
She
Ring
Per
Use
Ally
Cause
Tan
Ten
Sin
Lit
Hear
Act
End
King
Thou
Self
Bee
Though
Son
Tie
Heart
Lie
Once
Call
Miles
Low
Father
Fat
Hum
Ways
Seem
Tell
Rent
Understand
Wrong
Ought
Tea
Himself
Pen
Los
Mean
Ears
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