Quotes from Richard Yates

Wish I didn't have to go to work tomorrow", he said. "Don't, then. Stay home." "No. I guess I've got to go.

It takes backbone to lead the life you want.

As an intense, nicotine-stained, Jean-Paul Sartre sort of man, wasn't it simple logic to expect that he'd be limited to intense, nicotine-stained Jean-Paul Sartre sorts of Women?

It haunted him all night, while he slept alone; it was still there in the morning, when he swallowed his coffee and backed down the driveway in the crumpled old Ford. And riding to work, one of the youngest and healthiest passengers on the train, he sat with the look of a man condemned to a very slow, painless death. He felt middle-aged.

Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life, and looking back it always seemed that the trouble began with their parents' divorce.

she had always been ready to take off the minute she happened to feel like it ("Don't talk to me that way, Frank, or I'm leaving. I mean it") or the minute anything went wrong.

They knew what forgiveness was; they were willing to take him for better or worse; they loved him.

Everything is selling. Nothing happens in this world, nothing comes into this world, until somebody makes a sale.

A man could rant and smash and grapple with the State Police, and still the sprinklers whirled at dusk on every lawn and the television droned in every living room.

Wasn't it true, then, that everything in his life from that point on had been a succession of things he hadn't really wanted to do?

Her voice had been the only sound in the room for ten minutes or more, and it had been continuous. She seemed keenly aware of this, but aware too that if she allowed herself to stop the house would fill with a silence as thick as water, an impossibly deep, wide pool in which she would flounder and drown.

The whole point of crying was to quit before you cornied it up. The whole point of grief itself was to cut it out while it was still honest, while it still meant something. Because the thing was so easily corrupted: let yourself go and you started embellishing your own sobs, or you started telling about the Wheelers with a sad, sentimental smile and saying Frank was courageous, and then what the hell did you have?

They say that we are better educated than our parents' generation. What they mean is that we go to school longer. It is not the same thing.

He was happy enough to stay in this jumbled, lively place where the drinks were cheap and the band was loud and he could feel the inner peace that comes from knowing that all your clothes are new and perfectly fitted.

She cried because she'd had such high, high hopes about the Wheelers tonight and now she was terribly, terribly, terribly disappointed. She cried because she was fifty six years old and her feet were ugly and swollen and horrible; she cried because none of the girls had liked her at school and none of the boys had liked her later; she cried because Howard Givings was the only man who'd ever asked her to marry him, and because she'd done it, and because her only child was insane.

If you haven't written a novel by the time you're forty you never will!

They could lie drowsing now under the sound of kindly voices in the living room, a sound whose intricately rhythmic rise and fall would slowly turn into the shape of their dreams. And if they came awake later to turn over and reach with their toes for new cool places in the sheets, they knew the sound would still be there—one voice very deep and the other soft and pretty, talking and talking, as substantial and soothing as a blue range of mountains seen from far away.

Not the prettiest girl in the world, maybe, but cute and quick and fun to have around.

I know I had it - I could feel it, the way you feel blood in your veins - and now I reach for it and reach for it, and it isn't there.

It always seemed to me," she said at last, "that it must require a great deal of courage to be an artist, if only because the creative process is such a lonely one. I should imagine it must be all the more difficult for a woman.

my first wife passed away in the spring of—" and for a moment he is touched with terror. The spring of what? Past? Future? What is any spring but a mindless rearrangement of cells in the crust of the spinning earth as it floats in endless circuit of its sun? What is the sun itself but one of a billion insensible stars forever going nowhere into nothingness? Infinity!

in avoiding specific goals he had avoided specific limitations

She quickly took a drink to hide her mouth. That mannerism had never changed: whenever Sarah was embarrassed, after she'd told a joke and was waiting for the laughter, or when she was afraid she'd talked too much, she would go for her mouth as if to cover nakedness - with Cokes or popsicles as a child, with drinks or cigarettes now. Maybe all the years of splayed, protruding teeth, and then of braces, had made her mouth the most vulnerable part of her for life.

Sometimes I can feel as if I were sparkling all over," she was saying, "and I want to go out and do something that's absolutely crazy, and marvelous…