Richard Russo Quotes

33 Sourced Quotes

Who but an English professor would threaten to kill a duck a day and hold up a goose as an example?

Richard Russo
Was anything in the world truer than that intuitive leap of the heart?

Richard Russo
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
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
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
Knowing and knowing what to do about it were two different things.

Richard Russo
Were it not for Occam's Razor, which always demands simplicity, I'd be tempted to believe that human beings are more influenced by distant causes than immediate ones. This would especially be true of overeducated people, who are capable of thinking past the immediate, of becoming obsessed by the remote. It's the old stuff, the conflicts we've never come to terms with, that sneaks up on us, half forgotten, insisting upon action.

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
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
It's possible to overlook character flaws of in-laws for the simple reason that you feel neither responsible for them nor genetically implicated.

Richard Russo
You can't possibly judge your ability to control something until you've experienced the extremes of its capabilities. Do you understand?

Richard Russo
One of the nice things about our marriage, at least to my way of thinking, is that my wife and I no longer have to argue every thing through. We each know what the other will say, and so the saying becomes an unnecessary formality. No doubt some marriage counselor would explain to us that our problem is a failure to communicate, but to my way of thinking we've worked long and hard to achieve this silence, Lily's and mine, so fraught with mutual understanding.

Richard Russo
In a novel, two characters discuss the glitch in a computer which causes it to scroll an endless series of meaningless symbols: He sighs. "It casts serious doubt on the old theory that an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of typewriters would eventually write the Great American Novel, doesn't it?"

Richard Russo
Where was the middle ground between a sense of adventure and just plain sense?

Richard Russo
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
People who imagine themselves to be self-made seldom enjoy examining the process of manufacture in detail.

Richard Russo
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.

Richard Russo
I was the one who did come through that door. You were the one she was waiting for.

Richard Russo
He'd discovered that his memories of that summer were like bad movie montages - young lovers tossing a Frisbee in the park, sharing a melting ice-cream cone, bicycling along the river, laughing, talking, kissing, a sappy score drowning out the dialogue because the screenwriter had no idea what these two people might say to each other.

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

Richard Russo
He looks like he could be taken in a fight. Not by me, but by somebody. Not anyone in Humanities, probably.

Richard Russo
Worse, I have to admit to feeling the jealousy of one crab for another that has managed to climb out of the barrel.

Richard Russo
At the risk of appearing disingenuous, I don't really think of myself as "writing humor." I'm simply reporting on the world I observe, which is frequently hilarious. Here's the thing. Most of what we witness in life is too complex to take in whole. Because of this we unconsciously edit what we see, select what to really record and what to ignore, which is why people who look at the same thing don't necessarily see the same thing... Comic writers don't so much invent funny things as strip away the distractions, the impediments to laughter.

Richard Russo
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
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
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
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
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
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