Quotes from Richard Ford

You're only good if you can do bad and decide not to.

I know you can dream your way through an otherwise fine life, and never wake up, which is what I almost did.

the worst thing about regret is that it makes you duck the chance of new regret, just as you get a glimmer that nothing is worth doing unless it has the potential to fuck up your whole life.

Life's passed along to us empty. We have to make up the happiness part.

Tweet, tweet, you're alive, you ignorant asshole.

Our ex-wifes always harbour secrets about us that make them irresistable. Until, of course, we remember who we are and what we did and why we are not married anymore.

Your life doesn't mean what you have or what you get. It's what you're willing to give up.

Humans generally get out the gist of what they need to say right at the beginning, then spend forever qualifying, contradicting, burnishing or taking important things back. Yor rareley miss anything by cutting most people off after two sentences.

Some idiotic things are well worth doing.

If loneliness is the disease, the story is the cure.

Most things don't stay the way they are very long.

He needed me to do what sons do for their fathers: bear witness that they're substantial, that they're not hollow, not ringing absences. That they count for something when little else seems to.

They may already know too much about their mother and father--nothing being more factual than divorce, where so much has to be explained and worked through intelligently (though they have tried to stay equable). I've noticed this is often the time when children begin calling their parents by their first names, becoming little ironists after their parents' faults. What could be lonelier for a parent than to be criticized by his child on a first-name basis?

What I know is, you have a better chance in life-of surviving it-if you tolerate loss well;manage not to be a cynic through it all;... to connect the unequal things into a whole that preserves the good,even if the good is not simple to find. We try, as my sister said. We try.

Someone ... tell us what's important, because we no longer know.

She was an artist. She held opposites in her mind.

At the exact moment any decision seems to be being made, it's usually long after the real decision was actually made--like light we see emitted from stars.

What I know is, you have chance in life--of surviving it--if you tolerate loss well; manage not to be a cynic through it all; to subordinate, as Ruskin implied, to keep proportion, to connect the unequal things into a whole that preserves the good, even if admittedly good is often not simple to find.

Well, I believe in the idea of 'normal' in the way that I believe in the idea of logic. Or the idea of character. All of these ethical constructs are just that: constructs.

Your father has to die, better he dies in your arms.

Your life doesn't mean what you have or what you get. Its what your'e willing to give up.

Maturity, as I conceived it, was recognizing what was bad or peculiar in life, admitting it has to stay that way, and going ahead with the best of things.

My father died in my arms. That's tumult. That's everything exploding.

Literature has as one of its principal allures that it tells you something about life that life itself can't tell you. I just thought literature is a thing that human beings do.