Quotes from Richard Russo

What you can't afford to lose is precisely what the world robs you of. How it knew what you needed the most, just so it could deny you that very thing, was a question for philosophers. Answer it and you'd have the kind of book Tom Ford would've considered worth writing: urgent and new and absolutely necessary. To write it, though, you'd have to be on fire.

Stories worked much the same way…A false note at the beginning was much more costly than one nearer the end because early errors were part of the foundation.

Late middle age, he was coming to understand, was a time of life when everything was predictable and yet somehow you failed to see any of it coming.

The task he has chosen for himself, of wooing my mother with a bright red pickup truck, a Patsy Cline tape, and a string of malapropisms, is ample justification to me for not taking the world too seriously, its relentless heartbreak notwithstanding.

His carefully calculated sincerity is almost entirely indistinguishable from the real thing.

diverting one's attention from the past was not the same as envisioning and embarking upon a future. On the other hand, if the past were razed, the slate wiped clean, maybe fewer people would confuse it with the future, and that at least would be something.

a story is like a virus that can rage only for as long as there are new hosts to infect.

Interesting, Miles thought. Like himself, Father Mark, as a child, had been reassured by the imagined proximity of God, whereas adults, perhaps because they so often were up to no good, took more comfort from His remoteness.

She never answers during the day, Max explained. She lets her machine pick up. People like you are the reason other people get answering machines to begin with, Miles told him. In fact, people like you are driving a lot of modern technology.

What an absolute folly love was. Talk about a flawed concept.

You get more misanthropic every day. - I get older every day. My experience of human nature gets wider and deeper.

Alas, he himself was a man too easily encouraged, too completely seduced by hope, only to be devastated by disappointment. He'd been born to privilege, conditioned to expect things would go well, and pathetically unable to cope once they started to go wrong.

By nature you instinctively seek out the middle road, midway between dangerous passion and soul-destroying indifference.

I hear you don't write any more, he says... Not true, I inform him. You should see the margins of my student papers. Not the same as writing a book though, right? Almost identical, I assure him. Both go largely unread.

The drive back to the Mid-fucking-west was always brutal, his parents barely speaking to each other, as if suddenly recalling last year's infidelities, or maybe contemplating whom they'd settle for this year. Sex, if you went by Griffin's parents, definitely took a backseat to real estate on the passion gauge.

People actually seemed to enjoy recalling that on a Saturday afternoon forty years ago Empire Avenue was bustling with people and cars and commerce, whereas now, of course, you could strafe it with automatic weapons and not harm a soul.

Perfect silence. This in response to Sully's key being turned in the ignition of the pickup.

Slow, tick decides. Thinks happen slow. she isn't quite sure why this understanding of the world's movement should be important, but she thinks it is. ...Take her parents- At the time, their separation had seemed a bolt from the blue, though she now realizes it had been a slow process, rooted in dissatisfaction and need....Mybe

La verdad no sirve como sustituto de una buena respuesta.

La forma más rápida de engendrar un nuevo deseo es satisfacer uno antiguo.

My favorite teacher in college advised me not to write a book until it was impossible not to.

To weigh and evaluate a vast grid of information, much of it meaningless, and to arrive at sensible, if erroneous, conclusions, is a skill not to be sneezed at.

Maybe this was the unstated purpose of education, to get young people to see the world through the tired eyes of age: disappointment and exhaustion and defeat masquerading as wisdom.

Was anything in the world truer than that intuitive leap of the heart?