Quotes from Richard Russo

feeling, as he always did these days, a terrible mix of irreconcilable emotions—the shame of his failed marriage, anger at Janine for her part in its dissolution, anger at himself for his own part, and gratitude that they'd managed to be faithful to a bad idea long enough to have this child.

I don't now how you could not kid about love and still claim to have a sense of humor

He looks like he sucked the bottle dry about three in the morning and then stayed awake another hour or two to whistle into it.

What was life but good barstools and bad ones, good fortune and bad, shifting from Sunday to Sunday, year to year, like the fortunes of the New England Patriots. There was no such thing as continual good fortune—or misfortune, except for the Red Sox, whose curse seemed eternal.

Coffin studied him for a long beat, then said, "Shit, Lincoln. I just lost an argument, didn't I." "I believe you did, yes." "And now you're all proud of yourself.

Ah, fuck the past, right?" And when Miles offered no opinion on whether this was either possible or advisable, his eyes narrowed. "My boy Zack's

Many inspired plans are hatched in darkness. And once dignity is surrendered there are plenty of options.

How the three of them had met at Jacy's sorority, where they all slung hash

The world is divided between kids who grew up wanting be their parents and those like us, who grow up wanting anything but. Neither group ever succeeds.

The offspring of two bookish parents, I made up my mind as a boy that I would be as unlike them as I could. I was determined not, as an adult, to look up from a book with that confused, abstracted, disappointed expression that my parents shared when jolted out of book life into real life.

Let us not forget Colby and the liberating effects of higher education. Though it doesn't liberate everyone, does it?

She had always seemed to him to be deep-down wild, the wilder because she harnessed that wildness most of the time.

The world is divided between kids who grew up wanting to be their parents and those like us, who wanted anything but. Neither group ever succeeds.

Maybe, like children, we assume ourselves to be of central importance, and we're not. Maybe the inequities that consume us here on earth aren't really the issue.

Outside of a dog," Teddy said, wiggling his eyebrows and puffing on an imaginary Groucho cigar, a whole other Marx than the one Mickey alluded to, "a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.

What made the contest between fate and free will so lopsided was that human beings invariably mistook one for the other, hurling themselves furiously against that which is fixed and immutable while ignoring the very things over which

Was this what we wanted from our oldest friends? Reassurance that the world we remember so fondly still exists? That it hasn't been replaced by a reality we're less fully committed to?

she'd come to believe life was like that: you could enjoy almost anything if you gave it enough time.

Maybe sheetrocking wasn't one of Sully's favorite jobs, but like most physical labor, there was a rhythm to it that you could find if you cared to look, and once you found this rhythm it'd get you through a morning. Rhythm was what Sully had counted on over the long years - that and the wisdom to understand that no job, no matter how thankless or stupid or backbreaking, could not be gotten through. The clock moved if you let it.

Miles smiled and gave her a kiss on top of the head, breathing her in, this kid who wasn't a kid anymore but still smelled like one. Everything about his daughter seemed just about right, including the way the second thing she said often contradicted the first. Things were going okay. Except they weren't.

ragged piece of thin glass jutted out of the socket, all that was left of the

Was this how wars happened, the seeds of conflict, large and small, growing in the gap between what people wanted to believe and what they feared must be true?

Lives are rivers. We imagine we can direct their paths, though in the end there's but one destination, and we end up being true to ourselves only because we have no choice.

Wondrous! he thought, how the heart leaps when one is chosen, especially later in life, after one would suppose the time for choosing and being chosen has passed.