Richard Russo - Straight Man (1997)

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

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

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
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