Quotes from Richard Ford

these were days when people still made things and used machines, instead of the opposite).

No te niegues a las cosas, y asegúrate de tener siempre algo que no te importe perder. Eso es importante.

I'm not a great hoper, Wade, I guess. We're not walking fast. Others pass us. I just go in for generic hopes. That good comes to me, that I do little harm and die in my sleep.

Would you think he was anybody like you?

Towns aren't even towns anymore," Vicki said, sensing my distraction with this sad evolution, and giving me a hug around my middle. "Dallas wasn't ever one, when you get right down to it. It's just a suburb looking for a place to light.

Sometimes we do not really become adults until after we suffer a good whacking loss, and our lives in a sense catch up with us and wash over us like a wave and everything goes

And I knew that was not a bad thing at all, not for anyone, in any life.

Somehow, and for no apparent reason, your decisions got tipped over and you lost your hold. And one day you woke up and you found yourself in the very situation you said you would never ever be in, and you did not know what was most important to you anymore. And after that, it was all over. And I did not want that to happen to me did not, in fact, think it ever would.

We do not, after all, deal in truths, only potentialities. Too much truth can be worse than death, and last longer.

In the thirties, after they were married, they lived simply and only for each other and for the day. They drank some, lived on the road with my father's salesman's job. They had a good time and felt they had little to look back on, and didn't look.

since he seemed to be the one left out somehow, the one who would be lonely soon, the one who had done something he would someday wish he hadn't and would have no one to tell him that it was all right, that they forgave him, that these things happen in the world.

It was such a thing to see, a view I had never seen and have not since.

I don't know what makes people do what they do, or call themselves what they call themselves, only that you have to live someone's life to be the expert.

I watch CNN every night, but never afterward think much about anything I see--even the election, as stupid as it is. I've come to loathe most sports, which I used to love--a loss I attribute to having seen the same thing over and over again too many times. Only death-row stories and sumo wrestling (narrated in Japanese) will keep me at the TV longer than ten minutes. My bedside table, as I've said, has novels and biographies I've read thirty pages into but can't tell you much about.

Voyez-vous, d'après mon expérience, c'est quand on a l'impression de ne pas progresser qu'on avance sans doute le plus. »

No one's permitted in except contractors, owners, and local officialdom (plus President Obama and our big candied yam of a governor).

Together—though perhaps only together—they were fully formed. They stayed on the road. Life went on as it had, from the thirties straight into the forties. They owned little—a bit of furniture, their clothes, no car.

Greater challenges might only have frustrated him and rendered him unhappy.

Love, Henry remembered thinking then, was a lengthy series of insignificant questions whose answers you couldn't live without.

I believe in what you see being most of what there is, as I've taught my students, and that life's passed along to us empty. So, while significance weighs heavy, that's the most it does. Hidden meaning is all but absent.

I like writing that's smart on the page.

But if I had to I would say that because I was his son, I can recognize now that life is short and has inadequacies, that once again it requires crucial avoidances as well as fillings-in to be acceptable.

Though when I turn to regard life -- my own or others'-- I now never fail to be struck, amid the onslaught of all that's happened and still is happening, by how much that's gone from me. Absences seem to surround and intrude upon everything. Though in acknowledging this, I cannot let it be a loss or even be a fact I regret, since that is merely how life is--another enduring truth we must notice.

don't see what this has to do with us." I say back, "Does everything have to be about you? Can you not project yourself outside yourself? Can you not take on another's life for your own benefit?