Quotes from Richard Russo

When someone loves you," she went on, "you don't have to wish for it to be so. You just know it is.

No, you wish. You have to be careful of wishing. It can hurt. It's better to wait until you know. Waiting for your father to turn up won't make him do it.

The more you had, it seemed to me, the larger your border that needed defending.

It wasn't that he denied that he owed Rub an apology. He just hated to establish an ugly precedent of public apology, which could conceivably open the floodgates to other forms of regret.

But it was a nice way of ignoring another simple truth—that people changed, with or without wars, and that we sometimes don't know people as well as we think we do, that the worst errors in judgment often result from imagining we understand what has escaped us entirely.

It seemed probable to me that my companion on the bus had lost someone, and that the loss had changed everything, created a truth that could not be modified, only accepted, reread.

Golf was not a game he'd ever particularly wanted to take up. Nobody he liked had ever played golf, and a lot of the people he disliked intensely played all the time.

His mother's position was that his father could come back and live with them again as soon as he grew up, but not until. His father had predicted that his mother would kiss his ass before he'd ever walk through that door again. Both of these, Lin had concluded, were highly unlikely events.

Why does a rich country like ours blame people who have nothing for its problems?

My father's ideas about debt were vague, cosmic. He figured if you had money and somebody needed some, you gave it to him, at least if the guy was all right and would do the same for you. Later on, if you needed it and he had it you could call on him. In the meantime, if you didn't need it, you left him alone.

The fact that the two were friends added a bittersweet quality and made the whole thing seem even more noble. The fact that so much damage had been traded over a girl elevated the contest into the realm of heroism.

It was Miss Beryl's view that anything involving crowds of jostling bargain seekers wouldn't be a bargain.

He'd imagined the world would be a better place when it was rid of Big Jim Sullivan, but it had remained pretty much the same place, with just one less person to blame things on.

I just heard Mother in the bathroom," she said, up on one elbow to smooth hair away from my forehead, a gentle, wonderful intimacy that took my breath away.

Indeed, a good hint that you've entered the realm of Art is that you immediately feel like giving up.

most people are trapped in a solitary existence, a life circumscribed by want and failures of imagination, limitations from which readers are exempt.

Of late, Mrs. Grouse had come to see virtually everything he enjoyed as a potential source of upset. She seemed intent on making his remaining years one long Lenten season. When he objected, she reminded him that objections were upsetting. "Send

I'm not hurting. That's the strange part. I don't mind losing the house, or anything in it. I know I should, and I'll probably feel better when I do, but right now I just feel bored. I'd even feel better if I thought there was some tragic flaw, some error in judgment I could trace everything to. If I could look back and say I'd missed a sign, and that if I hadn't, things would've been different.

the worst errors in judgment often result from imagining we understand what has escaped us entirely.

Tell me something," she said, before he closed the door. "What were you like when you were young?" "Just like this," he said. "Only more.

What kind of town? What kind of country? What kind of people? If my father had been on the courthouse steps that day, he might have been able to summon his deeply held conviction that ours was a good town, a good country, and that we were good people, but I couldn't think what to say, and Gabriel seemed grateful that things made no better sense to me than they did to him.

It's just that living with him—being married to him— is like being covered with these little cuts all the time. There's no big gash you can show anybody, nothing they'd believe would really hurt. But these damn little nicks, they suck the blood right out of you.

Bottomless need. What Miss Rosa didn't seem to understand was that this accurately described not only most children but also the scared child that lived, at least part of the time, deep inside most adults.

Even to my mother, her hard-won autonomy must at times have resembled a cage. Still, it was a cage of her own design, different from and superior to the one my father and her parents, and Gloversville itself ,would have put her in, if she'd allowed them to.