Quotes from Richard Russo

We do not want what's good for us.

Really? When? Had all his material become threadbare? After thirty years of marriage, were you supposed to come up with new stuff all the time?

You look like your mom," he said, smiling.

Also her perfume, which mingled with the crisp air off the lake below, creating an intoxicating mixture of damp earth and leaves and water and girl. Not woman, in Sully's opinion. Girl.

Like many fathers, Lincoln's now had two permanent residences—one in Dunbar, Arizona, the other in his only son's head.

a guest editorial decrying the town's mordant defeatism and criticizing the current Republican administration's unspoken policies, which could be summed up, he claimed, in nine words: No Spending. None. Ever. On Anything. Under Any Circumstances. Why not string one last banner across the street, he suggested: Let's Eat Dirt.

A silly lie. A lie so small and to so little purpose that it suggested to Miles a way of life, a strategy for confronting the world, and this was further reason—if any was needed—to doubt the truth of everything the man had said inside.

I also think it's possible for us to be better people tomorrow than we are today." He had no idea, of course, whether any of these things were true, in whole or in part. Still, what possible good could come of believing otherwise? —

She looked like a woman who had spent her whole life waiting in line.

the quickest way to beget a new desire, Bea knew, was to satisfy an old one...

The Decemberists. Belle and Sebastian. Mumford and Sons.

It's a terrible thing to be a disappointment to a good woman.

THE THING TO UNDERSTAND about your father," Lincoln's mother had once explained when he was in high school, "is that you always have a choice. You can do things his way, or you can wish you had.

You know my thoughts on arming morons," he'd once remarked from the bench after Raymer, then a young officer, had accidentally discharged his weapon, the wayward bullet narrowly missing an old woman seated on her commode half a block away. "If you arm one, you have to arm them all. Otherwise, it isn't even good sport.

Life may be a grand folly, as you say, but it is harder to appriciate the joke when you're always the butt of it.

there was something extravagantly excessive about the peony from the start, as if God had intended to suggest with this particular bloom that you could have too much of a good thing.

It's possible to overlook character flaws of in-laws for the simple reason that you feel neither responsible for them nor genetically implicated.

No. Simplicity and justice require that thought and deed not be carelessly elided.

Grace believed that those who could see their duty clearly were required by God to do the heavy lifting for the morally blind. Where

begin laughing too, though they have no idea why. Which

Lest it seem that I was neglected, I should point out that once I became known to the Mohawk Grill crowd, it was like having about two dozen more or less negligent fathers whose slender attentions and vague goodwill nevertheless added up.

Slow" works on an altogether different principle, on the deceptive impression that there's plenty of time to prepare, which conceals the central fact, that no matter how slow things go, you'll always be slower.

After all, diminishment seemed to be the order of the day. Wouldn't you think the spirit, unshackled at last from so many of the body's youthful imperatives and bolstered by the wisdom of experience, would finally become ascendant? Wasn't memory, that bully and oppressor, supposed to become soft and spongy?

wasn't in fact possible to strip life of its clutter for the simple reason that life was clutter.