Quotes from Richard Russo

Novel writing is mostly triage (this now, that later) and obstinacy. Trying something, and when that doesn't work, trying something else. Welcoming clutter Surrendering a good idea for a better one. Knowing you won't find the finish line for a year or two, or five...

These are not men of great imagination, but one can hardly blame them for not being prepared for this particular contingency, the sight of a tweet-jacketed, tenured, middle-aged, senior professor and department chair in a fake nose and glasses, brandishing a live, terrified goose... (Richard Russo, Straight Man)

Miles smiled. Can you keep a secret? Bea snorted. Did I tell you what you were in for if you married my daughter? No, Miles conceded. Well, then, she said, as if that settled the matter.

I put myself up for full professor, an act of such unprecedented and unmitigated arrogance that the committee approved it, thus effectively rooting me to the scene of the crime, too weighed down by tenure, rank, and salary to be marketable ever again.

You've become a clever man.

Rub wiped his nose on his sleeve. "I just wisht—" "What?" Rub sighed. Where to begin? "That I'd be nicer to you?" He shrugged again, but this was the gist of it, Sully could tell. "I wish I would, too," he said, and for some reason this seemed to cheer Rub up.

Perhaps he was frightened by the sheer prospect of matrimony, of marrying a girl he would one day want to murder.

The nurse who came in to take her blood was the same one who'd taken her blood pressure earlier, and she slapped the flesh on Miss Beryl's arm with some annoyance, as if she'd have preferred it to assume some other shape. Miss Beryl knew just how the woman felt.

was that what people had thought of as the good big one now would become the shitty little one. Worse, the quickest way to beget a new desire, Bea knew, was to satisfy an old one, and each new desire had a way of becoming more expensive than the last. If she was foolish enough to gratify her customers' current demands, who knew what they'd dream up next?

She hadn't so much spoken the words as let them out of their cages….

Non basta una vita One life isn't enough

instead of finishing up, he'd gone around to the south side and begun to scrape, an activity more in harmony with his mood. It felt far more satisfying to be peeling something away creating ugliness before restoring beauty.

he was pouring vinegar onto the hot grill, where it sputtered and foamed and hissed. The air was full of it for a few seconds, enough to get everyone at the counter teared up, but just as quickly it was gone, with an implicit promise that anything so intensely horrible would be design pass swiftly.

At 53, she was through with the foolishness of men's genitals. In fact, it had been many years since she had cared what hairy things dangled between their pale, scrawny legs. She now considered the fact that she had ever cared a kind of temporary lunacy and was thankful that her madness had been short lived, not terribly virulent and ultimately cured by marriage as God intended.

David has this theory that between your mom and dad and him and you there's, like, one complete person. Your father never thinks about anybody but himself, and your mom is always thinking about other people and never herself. David thinks only about the present and you only think about the past and the future.

Because yank out one thread from the fabric of human destiny, and everything unravels. Though it could also be said that things have a tendency to unravel regardless.

He was an amiable man who believed in amiable solutions, who forgave easily and couldn't understand that other people derived pleasure from withholding the very thing he always gave so freely.

You can't possibly judge your ability to control something until you've experienced the extremes of its capabilities.

Lincoln chuckled yet again. "What's that poem you're always quoting? About parents?" Teddy nodded. "Larkin.

probably horse doo had a name in french also, but that didn't mean god intended for you to eat it.

he always had the last word in all differences of opinion with his wife, and that—two words, actually—was, "Yes, dear.

You can do things his way, or you can wish you had.

For people who dealt largely in dreams, his father was fond of observing, realtors were a surprisingly unromantic bunch, like card counters in a Vegas casino.

He wasn't always trying to say witty things, and when he did say them, he felt no need to repeat them for changing company.