Top 40 Joshua Ferris Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Things could be worse and things could be so much better.”

— Joshua Ferris

2. “To conform is to lose your soul.”

— Joshua Ferris

3. “It is really irritating to work with irritating people.”

— Joshua Ferris

4. “I don’t write directly on to the computer because I don’t think well facing forward with fingers on a keyboard. I think better looking down holding a pen. And the concentration quotient of pen and paper is higher than when I’m moving words around on screen.”

— Joshua Ferris

5. “I come from a very illustrious line of divorces. We love to get divorced in my family. My mother and father have been married four times each – eight ceremonies with the best of intentions.”

— Joshua Ferris

6. “You think I alienate myself from society? Of course I alienate myself from society. It’s the only way I know of not being constantly reminded of all the ways I’m alienated from society.”

— Joshua Ferris

7. “All broken hearts are circumstantial. Every lovelorn jerk is the victim of bad timing, good intentions, and someone else’s poor decision making.”

— Joshua Ferris

8. “Without work, so much of one’s identity just evaporates.”

— Joshua Ferris

9. “Some days felt longer than other days. Some days felt like two whole days. Unfortunately those days were never weekend days. Our Saturdays and Sundays passed in half the time of a normal workday. In other words, some weeks it felt like we worked ten straight days and had only one day off.”

— Joshua Ferris

10. “But now, now he needed to let himself rest when it came time to rest, and to move on when it came time to move on, and to do so in the direction of the moving on.”

— Joshua Ferris

11. “The office is a romantic enabler because you’re always around the person you have a crush on. There’s no escape from, and maybe no desire to escape from, those pressure-cooker conditions. And there’s an automatic series of things you have to talk about all the time.”

— Joshua Ferris

12. “My first job is to write a book that I believe is compelling and deserves the long sustained attention that any novel requires, and to worry about the commerce only late in the game.”

— Joshua Ferris

13. “The connected get more connected while the disconnected get more disconnected.”

— Joshua Ferris

14. “After I left college I thought, very naively, that either you became someone interesting – an artist – or you went into academia. If you ended up in an office you were dull and lacking. And I ended up in an office.”

— Joshua Ferris

15. “Some people would never forget certain people, a few people would remember everyone, and most of us would mostly be forgotten.”

— Joshua Ferris

16. “We told him to get on with it. We liked wasting time, but almost nothing was more annoying than having our wasted time wasted on something not worth wasting it on.”

— Joshua Ferris

17. “We were fractious and overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise. At least those of us who smoked had something to look forward to at ten-fifteen.”

— Joshua Ferris

18. “If you can get by with quotes from The Godfather and nothing you say matters, that’s pretty bleak, don’t you think? Don’t we want what we say to matter?”

— Joshua Ferris

19. “It is forgivable to say nothing out of ignorance; it’s inexcusable to remain silent once awareness dawns.”

— Joshua Ferris

20. “Everyone desires relationships and community. Most people want to belong to a cohesive, like-minded group. It staves off loneliness. It promotes identity. These are natural and very human instincts.”

— Joshua Ferris

21. “We suffered failures of imagination just like everyone else, our daring was wanting, and our daily contentment too nearly adequate for us to give it up.”

— Joshua Ferris

22. “We found ourselves wanting to hurry time along, which was not in the long run good for our health. Everybody was trapped in this contradiction but nobody ever dared to articulate it.”

— Joshua Ferris

23. “A child, thought Carl, is not the only result of childbirth. A mother, too, is born. You see them every day – nondescript women with a bulge just above the groin, slightly double-chinned. Perpetually forty. Someone’s mother, you think. There is a child somewhere who has made this woman into a mother, and for the sake of the child she has altered her appearance to better play the part.”

— Joshua Ferris

24. “Every time you hear someone read your book and liked your book, you’re never sure whether that’s going to follow with a similar remark from someone else. Perhaps I have low expectations, but whenever I hear someone say, ‘I liked your book,’ I don’t know if it’s going to happen again.”

— Joshua Ferris

25. “One thing that I discovered about myself is I really don’t like traveling. I feel like it’s a terrible personal failing, but I was so satisfied to arrive at the conclusion.”

— Joshua Ferris

26. “I think it’s a very bad idea for someone to start writing for a readership.”

— Joshua Ferris

27. “We had the great good fortune and shortcomings of character that marked every generation that had never seen war.”

— Joshua Ferris

28. “I know what to do with my life. I just don’t know what to do with this one night.”

— Joshua Ferris

29. “The most unfortunate thing about being an atheist wasn’t the loss of God and all the comfort and reassurance of God – no small things – but the loss of a vital human vocabulary. Grace, charity, transcendence: I felt them as surely as any believer, even if we differed on the ultimate cause, and yet I had no right words for them.”

— Joshua Ferris

30. “The main questions of everyday life are too enormous to answer in any definitive sense.”

— Joshua Ferris

31. “One thing we knew for certain- despite all our certainties, it was very difficult to guess what one individual was thinking at any given moment.”

— Joshua Ferris

32. “We loved killing time and had perfected several ways of doing so. We wandered the hallways carrying papers that indicated some mission of business when in reality we were in search of free candy.”

— Joshua Ferris

33. “Hank Nearly was an avid reader. He arrived early in his brown corduroy coat, with a book taken from the library, copied all the pages on the Xerox machine, and sat at his desk reading what looked passebly like the honest pages of business. He’s make it through a three-hundred-page novel every two or three days.”

— Joshua Ferris

34. “I’ve always thought things were absurd. It would take a lot more effort for me to see things as reasonable.”

— Joshua Ferris

35. “Unless by some miracle, he got up from the chair and changed his life. Unless some store of character revealed itself, and with a little guidance from me, he returned in six months a new man. But even then, I thought, that change, that character, would have to be in him already. I was never going to manufacture it with a few stern warnings – God knows I’d tried – and pain forgets within the hour what it learns in an instant.”

— Joshua Ferris

36. “A multifaceted writer, very easy on the surface to pin down but incredibly difficult once you actually read him with any depth.”

— Joshua Ferris

37. “Why not just go with it? Just walk the dog and send the tweets and eat the scones and play with the hamsters and ride the bicycles and watch the sunsets and stream the movies and never worry about any of it? I didn’t know it could be that easy. I didn’t know that until just now. That sounds good to me. I think I might be able to do that. Who couldn’t do that? It would take somebody mentally ill not to do that, and I’m not mentally ill.”

— Joshua Ferris

38. “Everything was always something but something – and here was the rub – could never be everything.”

— Joshua Ferris

39. “After Connie and I broke up, I played a little game with myself out on the streets of Manhattan. It was called Things Could Be Worse. Things could be worse, I said to myself, I could be that guy.”

— Joshua Ferris

40. “Things Could Be Worse And Things Could Be So Much Better – that became the game, my running commentary on the streets of Manhattan, and I played it as well as the other slobs just trying to get by.”

— Joshua Ferris

41. “I have never stopped considering not becoming a writer.”

— Joshua Ferris

42. “Her internalization of Catholicism and its institutional disappointments suited a dental office perfectly, where guilt was often our last resort for motivating the masses.”

— Joshua Ferris

43. “I think we’re losing sight of what our ultimate goal is here,” said Genevieve. But we feared that if she was washed out, people would look right past the flyer.”

— Joshua Ferris

44. “This is really what you want? To live with a poet?” “Yes,” she said. “With the hot plate? And the lice?”

— Joshua Ferris

45. “The child of divorce and the parent without primary custody know these interstitial places well: the curb, the corridor, the terminal parking lot. It is there where you embrace, you shed tears, you thank God for reuniting you – or curse God for tearing you asunder once more. All the while, the elevator dings, the custodian sweeps up, the traffic cop urges you to get a move on.”

— Joshua Ferris

46. “Ha, ha – Job 39:25.”

— Joshua Ferris