Quotes from Richard Ford

to encounter me now at age sixty-six is to be unable to imagine me at fifteen...

I lie back on the bed and listen to the sounds of Easter—the optimist's holiday, the holiday with the suburbs in mind, the day for all those with sunny dispositions and a staunch belief in the middle view, a tiny, tidy holiday to remember sweetly and indistinctly as the very same day through all your life.

to sit in the empty stands of a Florida ball park and hear the sounds of glove leather and chatter;

sharing the future with someone would certainly mean that repetitions had to be managed more skillfully.

an infinite remoteness underlies us all.

The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying as a present to myself but haven't made much progress there—though I need to.

I think I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb signifies to be; to do; to suffer. I signify all three.

that jail existed for the opposite reason from why your home existed

And there is no nicer time on earth than now—everything in the offing, nothing gone wrong, all potential—the very polar opposite of how I felt driving home the other night, when everything was on the skids and nothing within a thousand kilometers worth anticipating. This is really all life is worth, when you come down to it.

No hay necesidad de tocar, besar, abrazar. Pero lo hago de todos modos. Es nuestro último fetiche. El amor no es otra cosa al fin y al cabo, que una interminable serie de actos individuales.

Porque no hay una forma adecuada de planificar la vida ni tampoco de vivirla: sólo un montón de formas inadecuadas.

Unbridled commerce isn't generally pretty, but it's always forward-thinking.

Men are a strange breed.

And I had the feeling he was far out ahead of me then and in many things. Any time spent with your child is partly a damn sad time, the sadness of life a-going, bright, vivid, each time a last. A loss. A glimpse into what could've been. It can be corrupting. I

It's not an unusual American story. Just as there's no right way to plan a life and no right way to live one—only plenty of wrong ways.

Our parents' lives, even those enfolded in obscurity, offer us our first, strong assurance that human events have consequence. Here we are, after all.

This is the only badge of true friendship I'm sure of: not to be curious.

Possibly this is one more version of disappearing into your life, the way career telephone company bigwigs, overdutiful parents and owners of wholesale lumber companies are said to do and never know it. You simply reach a point at which everything looks the same but nothing matters much. There's no evidence you're dead, but you act that way.

For the two of us, ours was just a version of life briefly perfected (though in a way that showed me something) and that ended.

The saved moment is the true art of love.

disaffected—as if something had gone wrong

Anyone could be anyone else in most ways. Face the facts.

I do not hold to the old belief that professors like writers because they can see us fail in a grander and sillier and therefore more unequivocal way than they have. On the contrary, they like to see someone trying, giving it all up to set a permanent mark.

Todos somos partes de la tierra; algunos estamos destinados a ser grandes afluentes y a guiar las aguas por el terreno, alimentándolo y haciéndolo crecer. Algunos somos montañas que vigilan las fronteras de las naciones, protegiendo a las personas inocentes de los planes de los invasores. Y algunos de nosotros no somos más que flores, con un breve lapso para crecer a la luz del sol antes de morir.