Robert James Waller Quotes

21 Sourced Quotes

In a universe of ambiguity, this kind of certainty comes only once, and never again, no matter how many lifetimes you live.

Robert James Waller
I sometimes have the feeling you've been here a long time, more than one lifetime, and that you've dwelt in private places none of the rest of us has even dreamed about.

Robert James Waller
And I remember most of what I know that is good and true and lasting has come not from scholars but from minstrels and gypsies...

Robert James Waller
The overriding problem with our country, and our world in general, is that we are, in large part, managed by incompetents. Most of these are men who have spent their lives seeking power rather than themselves.

Robert James Waller
An inherent kindness exists in the process of aging... we are allowed to move along gradually.

Robert James Waller
For we have come by different ways to this place... I can tell by the natural ease with which you wear fine clothes and the way your mouth moves when you speak with waiters in good restaurants. You have come the way of castles and cathedrals, of elegance and empire.

Robert James Waller
The curse of modern times is the preponderance of male hormones in places where they can do long-term damage. Even if were not talking about wars between nations or assaults on nature, there's still that aggressiveness that keeps us apart from each other and the problems we need to be working on.

Robert James Waller
Anyone who can feel that way about a woman is worth lovin himself.

Robert James Waller
Sometime I'm going to do an essay called 'The Virtues of Amateurism' for all of those people who wish they earned their living in the arts. The market kills more artistic people than anything else. It's a world of safety out there, for most people. They want safety, the magazines and manufacturers give them safety, give them homogeneity, give them the familiar and comfortable, don't challenge them.

Robert James Waller
I am the highway and a peregrine and all the sails that ever went to sea

Robert James Waller
It's clear to me now that I have been moving toward you and you toward me for a long time. Though neither of us was aware of the other before we met, there was a kind of mindless certainty bumming blithely along beneath our ignorance that ensured we would come together. Like two solitary birds flying the great prairies by celestial reckoning, all of these years and lifetimes we have been moving toward one another.

Robert James Waller
Analysis destroys wholes. Some things, magic things, are meant to stay whole. If you look at their pieces, they go away.

Robert James Waller
Complex things are easy to do. Simplicity's the real challenge.

Robert James Waller
This is why I'm here on this planet, at this time, Francesca. Not to travel or make pictures, but to love you. I know that now. I have been falling from the rim of a great, high place, somewhere back in time, for many more years than I have lived in this life. And through all of those years, I have been falling toward you.

Robert James Waller
The road is a strange place. Shuffling along, I looked up and you were there walking across the grass toward my truck on an August day. In retrospect, it seems inevitable - it could not have been any other way— a case of what I call the high probability of the improbable

Robert James Waller
So here I am walking around with another person inside of me. Though I think I put it better the day we parted when I said there is a third person we have created from the two of us. And I am stalked now by that other entity.

Robert James Waller
We have both lost ourselves and created something else, something that exists only as an interlacing of the two of us.

Robert James Waller
There are songs that come free from the blue-eyed grass, from the dust of a thousand country roads. This is one of them.

Robert James Waller
The old dreams were good dreams; they didn't work out but I'm glad I had them.

Robert James Waller
The reality is not exactly what the song started out to be, but it's not a bad song.

Robert James Waller
Such physical matters were nice, yet, to him, intelligence and passion born of living, the ability to move and be moved by subtleties of the mind and spirit, were what really counted.

Robert James Waller