Richard Ford Quotes

39 Sourced Quotes

It's probably nice to know your parents were once not your parents.

Richard Ford
And though they may both have felt that something had died between them, something they may not even have been aware or until it was gone and disappeared from their lives forever, they must've felt - both of them - that there was something of themselves, something important, that could not live at all in any other way but by their being together, much as they had been before.

Richard Ford
If there's another thing that sportswriting teaches you, it is that there are no transcendent themes in life. In all cases things are here and they're over, and that has to be enough.

Richard Ford
It is no loss to mankind when one writer decides to call it a day. When a tree falls in the forest, who cares but the monkeys?

Richard Ford
Someone... tell us what's important, because we no longer know.

Richard Ford
What I know is, you have chance in life—of surviving it—if you tolerate loss well; manage not to be a cynic through it all; to subordinate, as Ruskin implied, to keep proportion, to connect the unequal things into a whole that preserves the good, even if admittedly good is often not simple to find.

Richard Ford
The world is a more engaging and less dramatic place than writers ever give it credit for being

Richard Ford
You can get carried away with how things were once, and not how you need to make them better.

Richard Ford
For, how else to seize such an instant? How to shout out into the empty air just the right words, and on cue? Frame a moment to last a lifetime?

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
People surprise you, Frank, with just how fuckin stupid they are. I mean, do you actually realize how much adult conversation is spent on this fuckin business? Facts treated like they were opinions just for the simple purpose of talking about it longer? Some people might think that's interesting, bub, but I'll tell you. It's romanticizing a goddamn rock by calling it a mountain range to me. People waste a helluva lot of time they could be putting to useful purposes. This is a game. See it and forget about it.

Richard Ford
I realized I loved you, and I didn't want to be married to somebody I didn't love. I wanted to be married to you. It isn't all that complicated.

Richard Ford
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
Things happen when people are not where they belong, and the world moves forward and back by that principle.

Richard Ford
For a time after my divorce everything began to seem profoundly ironic to me. I found myself thinking of other peoples' worries as sources of amusement and private derision which I thought about at night to make myself feel better.

Richard Ford
In the fall of 1960, when I was sixteen and my father was for a time not working, my mother met a man named Warren Miller and fell in love with him.

Richard Ford
Only sometimes you can't feel anything about a subject without hypothesizing its extinction.

Richard Ford
Cynicism makes you feel smart, I know it, even when you aren't smart.

Richard Ford
Very early you come to the realization that nothing will ever take you away from yourself.

Richard Ford
If sportswriting teaches you anything, and there is much truth to it as well as plenty of lies, it is that for your life to be worth anything you must sooner or later face the possibility of terrible, searing regret. Though you must also manage to avoid it or your life will be ruined.

Richard Ford
Life's passed along to us empty. We have to make up the happiness part.

Richard Ford
What there is to learn from almost any human experience is that your own interests usually do not come first where other people are concerned — even the people who love you — and that is all right. It can be lived with.

Richard Ford
One day you think you never even made a choice and then you have to make one, even a wrong one, just so you're sure you're still able. And once that's over, you can go back and be happy again with what you were before you started worrying.

Richard Ford
Her complexion seemed slowly to be losing its olive color, and the set of her mouth hardened as though interior shifts were taking place she herself didn't know about but which had already corrected her outlook toward the rest of the world.

Richard Ford
Any rainy summer morning, of course, has the seeds of gloomy alienation sown in. But a rainy summer morning far from home - when your personal clouds don't move but hang - can easily produce the feeling of the world as seen from the grave. This I know.

Richard Ford
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
Sometimes we do not really become adults until we suffer a good whacking loss, and our lives in a sense catch up with us and wash over us like a wave and everything goes.

Richard Ford
Married life requires shared mystery even when all the facts are known.

Richard Ford
Just exactly what that good life was — the one I expected — I cannot tell you now exactly, though I wouldn't say it has not come to pass, only that much has come in between.

Richard Ford
Our ex-wifes always harbor secrets about us that make them irresistible. Until, of course, we remember who we are and what we did and why we are not married anymore.

Richard Ford