Richard Yates (novelist) Quotes

17 Sourced Quotes

He took each fact as it came and let it slip painlessly into the back of his mind, thinking, Okay, okay, I'll think about that one later; and that one; and that one; so that the alert, front part of his mind could remain free enough to keep him in command of the situation.

Richard Yates
The hell with "love" anyway, and with every other phony, time-wasting, half-assed emotion in the world.

Richard Yates
He knew it was possible for shame to be nursed and doctored like an illness, if you wanted to keep it separate from the rest of your life, but that didn't mean there'd be any way to keep from knowing it was there.

Richard Yates
It haunted him all night, while he slept alone; it was still there in the morning, when he swallowed his coffee and backed down the driveway in the crumpled old Ford. And riding to work, one of the youngest and healthiest passengers on the train, he sat with the look of a man condemned to a very slow, painless death. He felt middle-aged.

Richard Yates
It's a disease. Nobody thinks or feels or cares any more; nobody gets excited or believes in anything except their own comfortable little God damn mediocrity.

Richard Yates
The Revolutionary Hill Estates had not been designed to accommodate a tragedy. Even at night, as if on purpose, the development held no looming shadows and no gaunt silhouettes. It was invincibly cheerful, a toyland of white and pastel houses whose bright, uncurtained windows winked blandly through a dappling of green and yellow leaves … A man running down these streets in desperate grief was indecently out of place.

Richard Yates
He couldn't even tell whether he was angry or contrite, whether it was forgiveness he wanted or the power to forgive.

Richard Yates
God knows there certainly ought to be a window around here somewhere, for all of us.

Richard Yates
And do you know a funny thing? I'm almost fifty years old and I've never understood anything in my whole life.

Richard Yates
People did change, and a change could be a bloom as well as a withering...

Richard Yates
His job was the very least important part of his life, never to be mentioned except in irony.

Richard Yates
In avoiding specific goals he had avoided specific limitations. For the time being the world, life itself, could be his chosen field.

Richard Yates
A man could rant and smash and grapple with the State Police, and still the sprinklers whirled at dusk on every lawn and the television droned in every living room.

Richard Yates
What a subtle, treacherous thing it was to let yourself go that way! Because once you've started it was terribly difficult to stop; soon you were saying "I'm sorry, of course you're right", and "Whatever you think is best", and "you're the most wonderful and valuable thing int he world", and the next thing you knew all honesty, all truth, was as far away and glimmering, as hopelessly unattainable as the world of the golden people.

Richard Yates
Know what we did, Lucy? You and me? We spent our whole lives yearning. Isn't that the God damndest thing?

Richard Yates
If you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone.

Richard Yates
Intelligent, thinking people could take things like this in their stride, just as they took the larger absurdities of deadly dull jobs in the city and deadly dull homes in the suburbs. Economic circumstances might force you to live in this environment, but the important thing was to keep from being contaminated. The important thing, always, was to remember who you were.

Richard Yates