Quotes from Richard Ford

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 to fuck up your whole life.

Les adieux classiques, où tout le monde respecte pieusement les formes, c'est l'exception, dans la vie, pas la règle.

Rien n'est jamais clair car nous disposons tous d'un éventail de moi parmi lesquels choisir.

apropos of nothing.

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 to fuck up your whole life. A

Life had begun to demand lies in order to be workable. And I was willing to tell one, or many more than one

We drove up onto the interstate and went toward Spokane, where I had lived once and Arlene had, too, though we didn't know each other then the old days, before marriage and children and divorce, before we met the lives we would eventually lead, and that we would be happy with or not.

Our lives were passed on to us empty and our task was to make up being happy.

for your life to be worth anything you must sooner or later face the possibility of terrible, searing regret.

Things happen that seem life-altering, then everything grinds down to being bearable--sometimes slightly better. Which could be a formula for doing anything you fuck-all wanted; or nothing ever meant much--which he did not accept for an instance . . . Still. Who ran their own brain. Your brain ran you.

Though possibly the answer is simple: it is just low-life, some coldness in us all, some helplessness that causes us to misunderstand life when it is pure and plain, makes our existence seem like a border between two nothings, and makes us no more or less than animals who meet on the road watchful, unforgiving, without patience or desire.

Standing behind them in the shadowy lobby I was

Fast getaways from sinister forces are sometimes essential, though what follows can mean puzzlement.

Plus, falling property values now ride through the trees like an odorless, colorless mist settling through the still air where all breathe it in, all sense it, though our new amenities—the new police cruisers, the new crosswalks, the trimmed tree branches, the buried electric, the refurbished band shell, the plans for the 4th of July parade—do what they civically can to ease our minds off worrying

It is a vacant vista, the acme of opulent American dreariness Ann has for some reason married into. I feel like getting up and walking out onto the lawn—waiting for my son in the grass.

My greatest human flaw and strength, not surprisingly, is that I can always imagine anything—a marriage, a conversation, a government—as being different from how it is, a trait that might make one a top-notch trial lawyer or novelist or realtor, but that also seems to produce a somewhat less than reliable and morally feasible human being.)

I don't care to see Dr. Stopler and have my weaknesses vetted. My weaknesses, after all, have taken me this far.

Lástima que no estemos expuestos a más momentos inesperados.

the one my son visits warn us about such feelings, flagging us all away from the poison of euphoria and hauling us back to flat earth, where they want us to be.)

Be sure you're not completely wrong, then go ahead.

Ann says I fabricate these feelings. But so what? I still have them.

bobby pins in it. On the wall

there is mystery everywhere, even in a vulgar, urine-scented, suburban depot such as this. You have only to let yourself in for it. You can never know what's coming next. Always there is the chance it will be—miraculous to say—something you want.

Though I thought if you grew up in a place with such a strange name—including Saskatchewan (a name I'd rarely heard before)—then you'd always feel strange about yourself.