Quotes from James Richardson

Sophistication is upscale conformity.

You have two kinds of secrets. The ones only you know. The ones only you don't.

There are silences harder to take back than words.

Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half is preventing people from reading what they expected you to mean.

To me the great divide is between the talkative and the quiet. Do they just say everything that's on their minds, even before it's on their minds? Sometimes I think I could just turn up my head like a Walkman so what's going on there could be heard by others. But there would still be a difference. For inside the head they are talking to people like them, and I am talking to someone like me: he is quiet and doesn't much like being talked at; he can't conceal how easily he gets bored.

Who breaks the thread, the one who pulls, the one who holds on?

It is by now proverbial that every proverb has its opposite. For every Time is money there is a Stop and smell the roses . When someone says You never stand in the same river twice someone else has already replied There is nothing new under the sun . In the mind's arithmetic, 1 plus -1 equals 2. Truths are not quantities but scripts: Become for a moment the mind in which this is true .

What is more yours than what always holds you back?

All work is the avoidance of harder work.

I sell my time to get enough money to buy it back.

If you do more than your share you'd better want to: otherwise, you're paying yourself in a currency recognized nowhere else.

It is the empty seats that listen most raptly.

Music is the highest art, no question. But literature is a friendlier one. It depends on us more, bores us more quickly, can't go on if we don't, can't stop saying what it means, can't stop giving us something to forgive.

Here in the last minutes, the very end of the world, someone's tightening a screw thinner than an eyelash, someone with slim wrists is straightening flowers...

Though now, of all that could have been, there is nothing.

If it can be used again, it is not wisdom but theory.

this is the last house in summer and now is the double loneliness of missing a party you don't even want to be at.

Tyranny and fantasy both like to write everyone else's lines.

The way things broken off a little too soon can last forever.

You look up from an oldish author: Is he dead? Such power we have, not knowing. Let him live.

We don't have to be anywhere. The party we left and the one we were headed to are probably over.

Loving yourself is about as likely as tickling yourself.

Hope is a door left unlatched in a high wind banging and banging itself to pieces.

How often feelings are circular. How embarrassing to be embarrassed. How annoying to be annoyed.