Quotes from Richard Yates

With parched, hard-breathing mouths, with wobbling heads and shaking limbs, they settled themselves in the car like very old and tired people.

Intelligent, thinking people could take things like this in their stride, just as they took the larger absurdities of deadly dull jobs in the city and deadly dull homes in the suburbs. Economic circumstance might force you to live in this environment, but the important thing was to keep from being contaminated. The important thing, always, was to remember who you were.

And all because, in a sentimentally lonely time long ago, she had found it easy and agreeable to believe whatever this one particular boy felt like saying, and to repay him for that pleasure by telling easy, agreeable lies of her own, until each was saying what the other most wanted to hear...

I'm sure it's probably a mistake to try and draw your own conclusions from the things you read in books. Who knows?

On their right, in a black marsh, the spring peepers were in full and desperate song.

She bought a chocolate bar and it tasted surprisingly good - as if, without her knowing it, sitting here and eating this chocolate was the one thing she had wanted to do all day.

Anybody's marriage might benefit from an occasional embargo on talk.

Yes, me." She made a claw of her hand and clutched at her collarbone. "Me. Me. Me. Oh, you poor, self-deluded—Look at you! Look at you, and tell me how by any stretch"—she tossed her head, and the grin of her teeth glistened white in the moonlight—"by any stretch of the imagination you can call yourself a man!

He knew it was possible for shame to be nursed and doctored like an illness, if you wanted to keep it separate from the rest of your life, but that didn't mean there'd be any way to keep from knowing it was there.

There's never been anything funny about a woman dying for love.

An intellectual might lose her virginity to a soldier in the park, but she could learn to look back on it with wry, amused detachment. An intellectual might have a mother who showed her underpants when drunk, but she wouldn't let it bother her. And Emily Grimes might not be an intellectual yet, but if she took copious notes in even the dullest of her classes, and if she read every night until her eyes ached, it was only a question of time.

I don't think about growing old," she said. "I know you don't. That's one of the things I admire about you, Alice. You have some kind of boundless faith in the future. You never give up." "I suppose I'm an optimist.

time and again they read the promise of failure in each other's eyes

Perché cambiava sempre tutto, quando l'unica cosa che si desiderava, l'unica cosa che si era mai chiesta umilmente a Dio o a chi per lui, era che certe cose potessero restare immutate?

Like frustrated suburban wives we fed on each other's discontent; we became divided into mean little cliques and subdivided into jealously shifting pairs of buddies, and we pieced out our idleness with gossip.

He watched her with murderous distaste as she fumbled with her spoon. They had ordered ice cream, and some of it clung to her lips as she rolled a cold mouthful on her tongue.

Surely the man was too old to be her boyfriend - he looked about fifty - but maybe he took a fatherly interest in her; maybe she had come to rely on his plain, straightforward advice in meeting the various uncertainties of her young life.

Look, I can explain everything" was the most commonly used line of dialogue in the history of American movies

My time on the financial desk had become a slow ordeal of waiting for my superiors to discover more and more of how little I knew about what I was doing; and now however pathetically willing I might be to learn all the things I was supposed to know, it had become much too ludicrously late to ask.

Well, your mother has her own way of dealing with information.

Don't you see what I'm saying? It's got nothing to do with definite, measurable talents - it's your very essence that's being stifled here. It's what you are that's being denied and denied and denied in this kind of life.

Dan Rosenthal rose happily from his drawing board to shake hands on hearing there was a baby on the way. But after that brief ceremony, when we'd both sat down again, he peered at me reflectively. "How can you be a father," he asked, "when you still look like a son?" 

It was turning into mindless, unrewarding work, the kind of work that makes you clumsy with fatigue and petulant with lack of progress, and it looked as if it would take all summer.

the shelves on shelves of unread or half-read or read-and-forgotten books that had always been supposed to make such a difference and never had; the loathsome, gloating maw of the television set;