Quotes from Richard Russo

My mother has always been the sort of woman whose emotional state can be intuited from the volume at which she rattles kitchen utensils.

yank out one thread from the fabric of human destiny, and everything unravels.

Most Americans want it to be 1959, with the addition of cappuccino and cable TV.

The attraction of cynicism was that it so often put you in the right, as if being right led directly to happiness.

Miles couldn't help admiring women for their ability to dismiss the evidence of their senses. If that's what explained it. If it wasn't simply that from time to time they were unaccountably drawn to the grotesque.

Hell, at twenty, he'd been ready to junk everything and start over too. But now, at sixty, he was less willing to throw things away that could be patched together and kept running for a few more months. He wanted to keep going forward, not stop and turn around and analyze the validity of decisions made and courses charted long ago.

he'd have to improve significantly to achieve mediocrity.

Whereas some people's attitude suggested that perhaps they knew something you didn't, Mrs. Whiting's implied that she knew everything you didn't. She alone had been paying attention, so it was her duty to bring you at least partially up to speed.

He clearly regarded finding the glove compartment locked now as a disappointing development. Like arriving someplace for dinner, assuming you'd be welcome, and finding your place setting in the cupboard.

It was hard to imagine him in love. I knew that he and my mother must have once felt passion, since that was what love entailed, but I was grateful that over time the madness had evolved into something more like friendship or a business partnership, something I myself could be an integral part of. Even seeing my father recollect passion was disconcerting.

Whereas God, for reasons of His own, sometimes chooses to let the machine answer. The Supreme Being is unavailable to come to the phone at this time, but He wants you to know what your call is important to Him. In the meantime, for sins of pride, press one. For avarice, press two...

Contemplation was like sitting on a committee that seldom made recommendations and was ignored when it did, a committee that lacked even the authority to disband.

Max would conclude, that's who I want to be. The pope. And I'll do the same thing he does. I'll keep all the goddamn money.

Worse, I have to admit to feeling the jealousy of one crab for another that has managed to climb out of the barrel.

imagination without energy remains inert...

Odd that the future should be so difficult to bring into focus when the past, uninvited, offered itself up so easily for inspection.

Say I told you so. They're the four most satisfying words in the English language. You could rupture something trying to keep them inside you.

One of the unfortunate side effects of teaching for forty years was that the task was so monumental, even in recollection, that it sometimes seemed you'd tried to teach everyone on the planet. What Miss Beryl looked for in each adult face was the evidence of some failed lesson in some distant yesterday that might predict incompetence today.

Like many men addicted to sports, Clive Sr. was also a religious man.

For years now he'd believed he had no further urgent business with this world, or it with him. But it could be he was wrong.

Mr. Purty has cheered me up. 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… (Richard Russo, Straight Man)

God) seemed to know everything that was in her heart and to understand that nothing dwelt there that wasn't absolutely necessary to her survival.

That, very simply, was what adulthood must be all about—acquiring the skill to bury things more deeply. Out of sight and, whenever possible, out of mind.

After all, what was the whole wide world but a place for people to yearn for their hearts' impossible desires, for those desires to become entrenched in defiance of logic, plausibility, and even the passage of time, as eternal as polished marble?