Quotes from Richard Russo

Sully grinned down at her. "We wear the chains we forge in life, old girl." Miss Beryl blinked. "Who'd have thunk it? A literary allusion from the lips of Donald Sullivan. I don't suppose you remember who said that." "You did," Sully reminded her. "All through eighth grade.

The line of gray along the horizon is brighter now, and with the coming light I feel a certainty: that there is, despite our wild imaginings, only one life. The ghostly others, no matter how real they seem, no matter how badly we need them, are phantoms. The one life we're left with is sufficient to fill and refill our imperfect hearts with joy, and then to shatter them. And it never, ever lets up. Blame love.

Does adult life amount to anything more than a futile attempt to invalidate the deepest truths we know about ourselves and our world?

This was what Miss Beryl had been coming back to, all day, all her life probably, to the mystery of affection, of the heart inclining in one direction and not another, of its unexpected, unwished-for pirouettes, its ability to make a fool, a villain, of its owner, if indeed any human can be said to own his heart. "I know this," she'd told Clive Sr. that long-ago afternoon. "Love is a stupid thing.

Like many men addicted to sports, Clive Sr. was also a religious man and one who'd been raised to accept life's mysteries—the Blessed Trinity, for one instance, a woman's reasoning, for another.

Yes. He loves us all. "No!" Tunic emphatically disagreed. "God does not." Well, fuck him, then, Raymer thought, giddy with heat and blasphemy. Shame on God. "Because a shirker is a coward." No, God is.

He paid this boy minimum wage, and Mrs. Harold tutored him in Christian precepts for free from her seat at the cash register. Harold usually hired three of these boys a year. Four months was their average tenure, after which some were lured away by Mammon, in the form of a quarter-an-hour raise. Others just cleaned out the till and bolted. The last had left Mrs. Harold a note in the big bill slot of the cash register that said: "Jesus was a stupid fuck. And so are you.

books by her favorite "Golden Age" British mystery writers—Josephine Tey, Margery Allingham, Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, John Dickson Carr, and Agatha Christie—evil

I write about it not because I understand it, but because I don't.

I began to develop a firm conviction that most efforts to teach people things were wasted. All they needed was to go off some place quiet and read. Around

There was nothing like fear to make democracy real.

Because if you were God, it stood to reason your real enemy would be boredom. Sully

We stand before a hundred doors, choose to enter one, where we're faced with a hundred more and then choose again. We choose not just what we'll do, but who we'll be. Perhaps the sound of all those doors swinging shut behind us each time we select this one

A bicycle promises spring as surely as the hollowing out of melting snowbanks, the return of song birds, the first bright tulip bud.

Still, what made people tick was no great mystery, was it? Greed. Lust. Anger. Jealousy. You could almost let your voice fall right there. Love? Some people claimed it made the world go round, but he wasn't so sure about that. Love mostly turned out to be one of those other emotions, or a mixture of them, in disguise. Even if it did exist, Raymer doubted its relevance to much of anything.

We even discovered that our fathers had the same favorite saying: "Money talks. It says goodbye.

Laughter is often a more complex and thoughtful emotional response than tears, though we seem to believe that being moved to tears is somehow more noble

If you were going to be reckless in this life, you needed total commitment to the principle.

There are no small lives, there are no small stories, there are no small people.

Maybe the bad things didn't mean anything, as my father said, but in my head they kept trying to.

Hattie was an institution in Bath, and besides, everybody romanticized old people, seeing in them their own lost parents and grandparents, most of whom had bequeathed to their children the usual legacy of guilt, along with the gift of selective recollection. Most fathers and mothers did their children the great favor of dying before they began fouling themselves, before their children learned to equate them with urine-soaked undergarments and other grim realities of age and infirmity.

Sully understood this to be true, though it was a fairly recent phenomenon. Ruth had witnessed and reported it with considerable irritation. It couldn't have been the case when he was married to Vera, because his wife had kept a careful, detailed list of the things he did of which she disapproved, and she was not the sort of woman to hold anything back. She surely would have mentioned it if he'd slept with his eyes open.

These days his own storytelling was undermined by his stammer, as well as by his conviction that a story had to be true.

How, he couldn't help wondering, did you get to be this woman's age and still believe, as she apparently did, that everything meant something? She was obviously one of those people who just soldiered on, determined to believe whatever gave them comfort in the face of all contrary evidence. And maybe that wasn't so dumb. The attraction of cynicism was that it so often put you in the right, as if being right led directly to happiness.