Quotes from Richard Russo

My afternoon comp class is not persuaded. In fact, they feel ill-treated...I've read three short essays aloud, anonymously, for the purpose of inspiring discussion or, failing discussion, private misgiving. It's my hope that if the majority of these intellectually addled young folk actually hear their words aloud, if they are forced to digest not only their advice to me but the logic that led to this advice, they will, if not change their minds, at least become acquainted with doubt.

Griffin's mother loathed grading papers, too, of course. Who didn't? But she was meticulous about correcting errors, offering style and content suggestions in the margins, asking pointed, often insulting, questions (How long did you work on this?) and then answering them herself (Not long, one hopes, given the result).

people confuse power with will because so few of them have the foggiest idea what they want. Absent any knowledge, will remains impotent. A limp dick, as it were." She regarded him, eyebrow arched. "The lucky few who happen actually to know what they want are said to have will-power.

people are forever confusing will with power

Come sit on my lap. I want to hear all about your sexual harassment lunch. -Hank to his secretary, Rachel

the truth is, we never know for sure about ourselves. Who we'll sleep with if given the opportunity, who we'll betray in the right circumstance, whose faith and love we will reward with our own. Only after we've done a thing do we know what we'll do...Which is why we have spouses and children and parents and colleagues and friends, because someone has to know us better than we know ourselves.

There are no compelling reasons for matrimony," Jacob admits. "Getting married is something you do despite compelling reasons.

One of the odd things about middle age, he concluded, was the strange decisions a man discovers he's made by not really making them, like allowing friends to drift away through simple neglect.

If she wanted to go back to Boston so damn bad, she should just do it. He said this knowing full well she wouldn't, for it was the particular curse of the Whiting men that their wives remained loyal to them out of spite. By

they were dreamers who felt no urgency about bringing their dreams to fruition.

No, most adults are like her father, whose fear, if he feels any, has been replaced by a kind of melancholy.

Over graduation weekend Jacy learned something about loneliness that she hadn't suspected before: that its most terrifying and virulent form could only be experienced in a crowd.

The problem with trying to gauge mathematical probability was that it presupposed the circumstance you were observing was governed by chance.

I don't dislike Gracie. At least I don't dislike her when I think about her. When I'm in one place and she's in another. It's when she's near enough to backhand that back-handing her always seems like a good idea. This is true of several of my colleagues, actually, though they don't bother me in the abstract.

Lincoln couldn't help wondering if what had happened at Rockers was best viewed as an isolated incident or as part of a long-established pattern, one that could be summed up as Teddy's life not, to borrow Coffin's term, working out . Even back at Minerva, Teddy had seemed resigned to the likelihood that it wouldn't. Which begged a question: Had Teddy meekly accepted what he saw as the invisible trajectory of his life, or had he courageously accepted what he couldn't possibly change?

In their brief absence a few of the more adventurous or desperate wives would seize the opportunity to hire a sitter and meet another of these boy-men, permanent whiskey-dicks, most of them, out at the Lamplighter Motor Court for a little taste of the road not taken, only to discover that it was pretty much the same shabby, two-lane blacktop they'd been traveling all along, just an unfamiliar stretch of it that nonetheless led to pretty much the same destination anyhow.

There was something about educated people that made it impossible for them to admit when they didn't understand something.

Still, Yolanda appreciated the fact that her meds allowed her to go among other people, who would treat her, when she was medicated, much like they would treat any other big-boned, over-weight girl with straight, mouse-brown hair, who lumbered across floors so heavily that objects rattled and the surfaces of liquid in glasses boiled. It was a relief not to be viewed as someone with special problems.

Nor do I want the woman that I'm married to and that I love to leave me, but the thought of her doing so moves me in a way that our growing old together and contentedly slipping, in affectionate tandem, toward the grave does not.

He's got a good, righteous head of steam up, and I envy him this. He's saying things that friendship has kept him from saying for twenty years, and their release at this late date is orgasmic. Asking him to stop would be like asking him to pull out.

Only after we've done a thing do we know what we'll do, and by then whatever we've done has already begun to sever itself from clear significance, at least for the doer. Which is why we have spouses and children and parents and colleagues and friends, because someone has to know us better than we know ourselves.

Maybe, as the old lady had suggested, it was all that catechism, its rote insistence on subordinating one's will to God's, so many of these lessons administered by the now senile priest who was seated a few yards away and giving him the evil eye. What in the world could these old goats have been discussing, Miles wondered.

I've got Abba in my head," she told him. "Make them go away.

old textile mill, which was in the process of being