Top 40 Kent Haruf Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “I wake each day and try to see what I might do that is of some value and joy. It’s a strange life. I don’t know how long it’ll go on. I don’t look past tomorrow. Anything beyond tomorrow seems like hearsay. Or fairy tales.”

— Kent Haruf

2. “Who would have thought at this time in our lives that we’d still have something like this. That it turns out we’re not finished with changes and excitements. And not all dried up in body and spirit.”

— Kent Haruf

3. “Honey, Maggie Jones said. Victoria. Listen to me. You’re here now. This is where you are.”

— Kent Haruf

4. “Our Souls at Night open onto larger insights about getting older?”

— Kent Haruf

5. “Who does ever get what they want? It doesn’t seem to happen to many of us if any at all. It’s always two people bumping against each other blindly, acting out old ideas and dreams and mistaken understandings.”

— Kent Haruf

6. “The evening wasn’t cold yet... But the air was turning sharp, with a fall feeling of loneliness coming. Something unaccountable pending in the air.”

— Kent Haruf

7. “You have been good for me. What more could anyone ask for? I’m a better person than I was before we got together. That’s your doing.”

— Kent Haruf

8. “You have to believe in yourself despite the evidence.”

— Kent Haruf

9. “He wanted to think of words that would make some difference but there were none in any language he knew that were sufficient to the moment or that would change a single thing.”

— Kent Haruf

10. “People in their houses at night. These ordinary lives. Passing without their knowing it. I’d hoped to recapture something. The officer stared at him. The precious ordinary. I.”

— Kent Haruf

11. “Here was this man Tom Guthrie in Holt standing at the back window in the kitchen of his house smoking cigarettes and looking out over the back lot where the sun was just coming up.”

— Kent Haruf

12. “You’re going to die some day without ever having had enough trouble in your life. Not of the right kind anyway.”

— Kent Haruf

13. “You don’t deserve it, he said aloud. Don’t ever begin to think that you do.”

— Kent Haruf

14. “It seems to me nothing man has done or built on this land is an improvement over what was here before.”

— Kent Haruf

15. “I made up my mind I’m not going to pay attention to what people think. I’ve done that too long – all my life. I’m not going to live that way anymore.”

— Kent Haruf

16. “You can’t fix things, can you, Louis said. We always want to. But we can’t.”

— Kent Haruf

17. “I wonder if you would come and sleep in the night with me. And talk.”

— Kent Haruf

18. “A girl is different. They want things. They need things on a regular schedule. Why, a girl’s got purposes you and me can’t even imagine. They got ideas in their heads you and me can’t even suppose.”

— Kent Haruf

19. “I do love this physical world. I love this physical life with you. And the air and the country. The backyard, the gravel in the back alley. The grass. The cool nights. Lying in bed talking with you in the dark.”

— Kent Haruf

20. “Addie Moore had a grandson named Jamie who was just turning six. In the early summer the trouble between his parents got worse. There were bad arguments in the kitchen and bedroom, accusations and recriminations, her tears and his shouts. They finally separated on a trial basis and she went off to California to stay with a friend, leaving Jamie with his father. He called Addie and told her what happened, that his wife had quit her job as a hairdresser and had gone out to the West Coast.”

— Kent Haruf

21. “My desire is to be anonymous, isolated, quiet, peaceful, and concentrated.”

— Kent Haruf

22. “I just want to live simply and pay attention to what’s happening each day.”

— Kent Haruf

23. “This ain’t going to be no goddamn Sunday school picnic.”

— Kent Haruf

24. “The shaggy saddle horses, already winter-coated, stood with their backs to the wind, watching the two men in the corral, the horses’ tails blowing out, their breath snorted out in white plumes and carried away in tatters by the wind.”

— Kent Haruf

25. “Fame isn’t healthy for a writer.”

— Kent Haruf

26. “Love is the most important part of life, isn’t it. If you have love you can live in this world in a true way and if you love each other you can see past everything and accept what you don’t understand and forgive what you don’t know or don’t like. Love is all. Love is patient and boundless and right-hearted and long-suffering. I hope you may love each other all your days of life together. And I hope you may have a great many years of those days.”

— Kent Haruf

27. “Not like I was. I’ve come to believe in some kind of afterlife. A return to our true selves, a spirit self. We’re just in this physical body till we go back to spirit.”

— Kent Haruf

28. “They don’t come to church on Sunday morning to think about new ideas or even the old important ones. They want to hear what they’ve been told before, with only some small variation on what they’ve been hearing all their lives, and then they want to go home and eat pot roast and say it was a good service and feel satisfied. But.”

— Kent Haruf

29. “Oh I feel better already talking with you here next to me.”

— Kent Haruf

30. “Addie and Louis sat down in front. She had arranged the funeral and told the minister about Ruth. He hadn’t known her at all. She had stopped going to any church because of her feeling about orthodoxy and the childish ways in which churches talked and thought about God.”

— Kent Haruf

31. “You’re not talking to her, Maggie Jones said. You and Raymond don’t talk like you should to that girl. Women want to hear some conversation in the evening. We don’t think that’s too much to ask. We’re willing to put up with a lot from you men, but in the evening we want to hear some talking. We want to have a little conversation in the house.”

— Kent Haruf

32. “Alene looked out toward the fading sky. There was only a little light remaining. It would turn nighttime now and soon they would return to the house. I would be too cool to sit outside. It would get dark out. I’m so lonely, she said. I had my chance and I lost it.”

— Kent Haruf

33. “But we didn’t know anything in our twenties when we were first married. It was all just instinct and the patterns we’d grown up with.”

— Kent Haruf

34. “Don’t you have any scars? Inside. Do you? Of course. You don’t act like it. I don’t intend to. It doesn’t do much good, does it?”

— Kent Haruf

35. “I’ve come to believe in some kind of afterlife. A return to our true selves, a spirit self. We’re.”

— Kent Haruf

36. “I don’t imagine I’ll ever get over missing him, Raymond said. Some things you don’t get over. I believe this’ll be one of them.”

— Kent Haruf

37. “It was surprising to him, how quickly she could fall asleep.”

— Kent Haruf

38. “This country’s crazy in terms of fame and what people think it means. They expect a writer to be something between a Hollywood starlet and the village idiot.”

— Kent Haruf

39. “The precious ordinary. I.”

— Kent Haruf

40. “And they had folded his brother’s hands across his suited chest, as if he would be preserved in this sanguine pose forever, but only the heavy callouses visible at the sides of his hands seemed real. It was only the callouses that appeared to be familiar and believable.”

— Kent Haruf

41. “Who would have thought at this time in our lives that we’d still have something like this.”

— Kent Haruf

42. “You are still in love with her. No. But I think I’m in love a little with the memory of her.”

— Kent Haruf

43. “I began writing seriously in my mid-20s and didnt publish my first book until I was 41.”

— Kent Haruf

44. “I believe there are failures of character, like I said before. That’s a sin.”

— Kent Haruf

45. “Mi chiedevo se ti andrebbe qualche volta di venire a dormire da me.” “Cosa? In che senso?” “Nel senso che siamo tutti e due soli. Ce ne stiamo per conto nostro da troppo tempo. Da anni. Io mi sento sola. Penso che anche tu lo sia. Mi chiedevo se ti andrebbe di venire a dormire da me, la notte. E parlare. Sto parlando di attraversare la notte insieme. Le notti sono la cosa peggiore, non trovi?”

— Kent Haruf

46. “Sins of omission, Louis said. You don’t believe in sins. I believe there are failures of character, like I said before. That’s a sin.”

— Kent Haruf