Quotes from Richard Ford

It's odd how our fears, the ones we didn't know we had, alter our sight line and make us see things that never were.

My always needn't be forever. I'm ready for the plunge, nervy as a cliff-diver. Though if down the line things go rotten we can both climb the cliffs again. Life is long.

Dreaminess is, among other things, a state of suspended recognition, and a response to too much useless and complicated factuality. Its symptoms can be a long-term interest in the weather, or a sustained soaring feeling, or a bout of the stares that you sometimes can not even know about except in retrospect, when the time may seem fogged.

Nothing in the world is as hopeful as knowing a woman you like is somewhere thinking about only you. Conversely, there is no badness anywhere as acute as the badness of no woman out in the world thinking about you. Or worse. That one has quit because of some bone-headedness on your part. It is like looking out an airplane window and finding the earth has disappeared. No loneliness can compete with that.

First, I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later.

good counsel: generosity, longevity, acceptance, relinquishment, letting the world come to me -- and, with these things to make a life.

I was born into an ordinary, modern existence in 1945, an only child to decent parents of no irregular point of view, no particular sense of their place in history's continuum, just two people afloat on the world and expectant like most others in time, without a daunting conviction about their own consequence.

Conversations with adults other than a person's parents had more of an outcome.

Very early you come to the realization that nothing will ever take you away from yourself.

It's odd how a piece of ground can hold so little of its meaning; though that's lucky, since for it to do so would make places sacred but impenetrable, whereas they're otherwise neither.

Such narrowly missed human connection as this can in fact be fatal, no matter who's at fault, and often results in unrecoverable free fall and a too-hasty conclusion that 'the whole goddamn thing's not worth bothering with or it wouldn't be so goddamn confusing all the goddamn time,' after which one party (or both) just wanders off and never thinks to look toward the other again. Such is the iffiness of romance.

The persuasive power of normal life is extravagant. To accept less than life when less is not overwhelmingly upon you is—at least for some—unacceptable.

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

life's most important moments are often barely noticed by others, if noticed at all.

It's odd, though, what makes you think about the truth. It's so rarely involved in the events of your life. I quit thinking about the truth for a time then. Its finer points seems impossible to find among the facts.

Meeting a girl, falling in love, marrying her, moving to Connecticut, buying a fucking house, starting a life with her and thinking you really knew anything about her--the last part was a complete fiction, which made all the rest a joke.

One of the down-side factors to living alone is that you sometimes get overly absorbed with how exact segments of time are consumed, and can begin to feel a pleasure with life that is hopelessly tinged with longing.

For writers - even sportswriters - bad news is always easier than good, since it is, after all, more familiar.

Possibly in the lobby she saw someone who reminded her too much of herself (that can happen to inexperienced travelers). Or worse. That no one there reminded her of anyone she ever knew.

then nothing was ever again as it had been. You don't think things like that can happen. Then you find out they both can and will. So

On writing: I don't like doing this, but it feels so good when I stop.

She understood perfectly that when the object of anticipation becomes paramount, trouble begins to lurk like a panther.

And it did seem strange to me because I was certain then what the difference was between what had happened and what hadn't, and knew I always would be.

Life is full of surprises, a wise man said, and would not be worth having if it were not.