Quotes from Richard Yates

Oh, gig, capisco. Spazi pubblicitari. E che rivista è?" "L'American Scientist". "Sta scherzando? Be', tanto di cappello. Pubblicano materiale sofisticato. Se lei capisce quella roba dev'essere…" "Non la capisco. La vendo e basta". "Come fa a vendere qualcosa che non capisce?" "Non è quello che fanno gli psichiatri?

All right," her voice said bleakly. "All right, suppose all this is true. Suppose I'm acting out a compulsive behavior pattern, or whatever they call it. So what? I still can't help what I feel, can I?

She touched it delicately with her fingertips in several places, not in any effort to smooth it but rather in the furtive, half-conscious way that he himself had sometimes touched his pimples at sixteen, just to make sure the horrible things were still there.

Yes, but still, if it was as adult and sophisticated as all that, why couldn't she decide what to do with her sweater? Why was she having such an awful time thinking of what in the world she could possibly say to the man?

How do you suppose we'd go about finding one?" she asked. "A psychiatrist, I mean. Aren't a lot of them supposed to be quacks? Well, but still, I guess that isn't really much of a problem, is it.

On nights when Gloria stayed up late enough to see Rachel come dreamily home she was always unsettled by the girl's appearance: clothes crushed and hair awry, eyes dazed and mouth swollen, with the lipstick eaten away. Love was often said to be torment, but Rachel could make it seem like punishment as well.

Emily knew she was going to cry. She tried to avert it with a childhood trick that had sometimes worked before - pressing both thumbnails hard into the tender flesh beneath the nails of her index fingers, so that the self-inflicted pain might be greater than the ache of her swelling throat - but it was no use.

Rachel was a girl who depended on small, recurrent rituals - that was one of the things he'd come to know about her, and his very ability to identify so specific a trait made him proud of his own capacity for tenderness.

She was probably sixty, a big rawboned woman with a man's face, and her clothes, if not her very pores, seemed always to exude that dry essence of pencil shavings and chalk dust that is the smell of school. She was strict and humorless, preoccupied with rooting out the things she held intolerable: mumbling, slumping, daydreaming, frequent trips to the bathroom, and, the worst of all, "coming to school without proper supplies."  

Warren Cox, God knew, was no prize; a commercial person, a sales person, the kind of man who said things like "x numbers of dollars". At lunch today, laboriously trying to explain some business procedure, he had said "x number of dollars" three times.

Remember what Anatole France said about the dog masturbating on your leg--'Sure, it's honest, but who needs it?

Our whole damn culture is geared to it; it's the new religion; it's everybody's intellectual and spiritual sugar-tit.

In the meantime, and this was the best part, in the meantime it was no longer necessary to dislike them.

E' stato così che noi due abbiamo accettato quest'enorme illusione, perché di questo si tratta: un'enorme, oscena illusione: l'idea che, una volta messa su famiglia, la gente debba rinunciare alla vita reale e "sistemarsi".E' la grande menzogna sentimentalistica piccolo borghese. la menzogna che ti ho obbligato ad accettare per tutto questo tempo.

How could any healthy girl be expected to care for a mentally unbalanced man?

Then he was gone, and Prentice was alone in a silence that rang with all his shrill, unspoken words. He was so alone that the only thing to do was lie back on the bed and roll over and draw up his knees like an unborn baby, staring with dry eyes at a cluster of pink flowers on the wallpaper, knowing he had never been so alone in his life.

marriage could always be—unexcited, companionable, a mutual tenderness touched with romance—

The slick, chin-high tops of cars made an undulating surface that stretched away into the darkness in all directions; beneath it stood endless shadowy ranks of fenders and fins, of intricately bulbous bumpers and grills alive with numberless points of reflected neon.

Parlando, la signora Givings contempló, distratta e affascinata insieme, la semitrasparenza cremisi che il sole morente metteva nel lobo dell'orecchio del marito, trasformando la sua forfora in fuochi infuocati, ma col pensiero stava già pregustando la serata.

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 sprinklers whirled at dusk on every lawn and the television droned in every living room. A woman's only son came home insane, confronting her with God only knew what agonies of grief and guilt, and still she busied herself with the doings of the zoning board, with little chirrups of neighborly good cheer and cardboard boxes full of garden plants.

Oh, Jesus, it was the loveliest and most terrible thing he'd ever seen; it was the source of the world; and his shame was so immediate that he let the fabric slip back into place after only a second or two.

I seem to have to lost confidence in just about everything else. I've come to believe that only a very, very few matters in the world can ever be trusted to make sense.

L'unica ragione per cui faccio questo stupido lavoro è...be', suppongo che di ragioni ce ne siano un sacco, ma il fatto è che se mi metto a stendere un elenco di tutte le ragioni possibili, l'unico che sono sicurissimo di non poter citare è che questo lavoro mi piaccia, perché non mi piace per niente. E io ho proprio la stramba idea che la gente sta meglio quando fa un lavoro che le piace.