Top 120 Richard Ford Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “She was an artist. She held opposites in her mind.”

— Richard Ford

52. “I’m a verb, Frank. Verbs don’t answer questions.”

— Richard Ford

53. “And I had the feeling he was far out ahead of me then and in many things. Any time spent with your child is partly a damn sad time, the sadness of life a-going, bright, vivid, each time a last. A loss. A glimpse into what could’ve been. It can be corrupting. I.”

— Richard Ford

54. “No words came out of me. Words can also be the feeblest emissaries for our feelings.”

— Richard Ford

55. “He needed me to do what sons do for their fathers: bear witness that they’re substantial, that they’re not hollow, not ringing absences. That they count for something when little else seems to.”

— Richard Ford

56. “And what there is to learn from almost any human experience is that your own interests usually do not come first where other people are concerned – even the people who love you – and that is all right. It can be lived with.”

— Richard Ford

57. “Our sympathies are most required when they seem least due.”

— Richard Ford

58. “A lot of things seem one way but are another. And how a thing seems is often just the game we play to save ourselves from great, panicking pain.”

— Richard Ford

59. “Nothing in the world is as hopeful as knowing a woman you like is somewhere thinking about only you. Conversely, there is no badness anywhere as acute as the badness of no woman out in the world thinking about you. Or worse. That one has quit because of some bone-headedness on your part. It is like looking out an airplane window and finding the earth has disappeared. No loneliness can compete with that.”

— Richard Ford

60. “The persuasive power of normal life is extravagant. To accept less than life when less is not overwhelmingly upon you is – at least for some – unacceptable.”

— Richard Ford

61. “I think I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb signifies to be; to do; to suffer. I signify all three.”

— Richard Ford

62. “Humans generally get out the gist of what they need to say right at the beginning, then spend forever qualifying, contradicting, burnishing or taking important things back. Yor rareley miss anything by cutting most people off after two sentences.”

— Richard Ford

63. “I’m not a great hoper, Wade, I guess.” We’re not walking fast. Others pass us. “I just go in for generic hopes. That good comes to me, that I do little harm and die in my sleep.”

— Richard Ford

64. “It was if we all sensed we’d be gone someday soon in a sudden instant – often it happened in the middle of the night – and didn’t want to get involved. Or else it was that none of us wanted to know anybody later on who was the way we were now.”

— Richard Ford

65. “We are past the end of things now, but I don’t want to leave.”

— Richard Ford

66. “The pace of life feels morally dangerous to me.”

— Richard Ford

67. “And it did seem strange to me because I was certain then what the difference was between what had happened and what hadn’t, and knew I always would be.”

— Richard Ford

68. “At heart, of course, a story itself is consolation’s instrument.”

— Richard Ford

69. “Love, Henry remembered thinking then, was a lengthy series of insignificant questions whose answers you couldn’t live without.”

— Richard Ford

70. “I don’t look in mirrors anymore. It’s cheaper than surgery.”

— Richard Ford

71. “Things happen when people are not where they belong, and the world moves forward and back by that principle.”

— Richard Ford

72. “I’m not one of those people who as a writer lets my characters tell me what they want to do or call to me or seek me. I go seeking for things, using them as an agent, really.”

— Richard Ford

73. “I’ve been mainly a happy boy in my life. I married the right girl and we did what we wanted to do.”

— Richard Ford

74. “The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying as a present to myself but haven’t made much progress there – though I need to.”

— Richard Ford

75. “I started reading literature at 17 or 18, and I felt this extra beat to life.”

— Richard Ford

76. “It is no loss to mankind when one writer decides to call it a day. When a tree falls in the forest, who cares but the monkeys?”

— Richard Ford

77. “It’s odd, though, what makes you think about the truth. It’s so rarely involved in the events of your life. I quit thinking about the truth for a time then. Its finer points seems impossible to find among the facts.”

— Richard Ford

78. “I’m an equal opportunity reader – although I don’t much read plays. And since I was raised a Presbyterian, pretty much all pleasures are guilty.”

— Richard Ford

79. “The longer they stayed on, and the better they knew each other, the better she at least could see their mistake, and the more misguided their lives became – like a long proof in mathematics in which the first calculation is wrong, following which all other calculations move you further away from how things were when they made sense.”

— Richard Ford

80. “Towns aren’t even towns anymore,” Vicki said, sensing my distraction with this sad evolution, and giving me a hug around my middle. “Dallas wasn’t ever one, when you get right down to it. It’s just a suburb looking for a place to light.”

— Richard Ford

81. “What was our life like? I almost don’t remember now. Though I remember it, the space of time it occupied. And I remember it fondly.”

— Richard Ford

82. “And there is no nicer time on earth than now – everything in the offing, nothing gone wrong, all potential – the very polar opposite of how I felt driving home the other night, when everything was on the skids and nothing within a thousand kilometers worth anticipating. This is really all life is worth, when you come down to it.”

— Richard Ford

83. “I don’t have a very logical and orderly mind.”

— Richard Ford

84. “I was born into an ordinary, modern existence in 1945, an only child to decent parents of no irregular point of view, no particular sense of their place in history’s continuum, just two people afloat on the world and expectant like most others in time, without a daunting conviction about their own consequence.”

— Richard Ford

85. “The ways in which things are superficially similar but also distinct is interesting to me.”

— Richard Ford

86. “She understood perfectly that when the object of anticipation becomes paramount, trouble begins to lurk like a panther.”

— Richard Ford

87. “In the thirties, after they were married, they lived simply and only for each other and for the day. They drank some, lived on the road with my father’s salesman’s job. They had a good time and felt they had little to look back on, and didn’t look.”

— Richard Ford

88. “Happiness for me is getting to write about the most important things I know.”

— Richard Ford

89. “The saved moment is the true art of love.”

— Richard Ford

90. “I’m kind of a distractible guy.”

— Richard Ford

91. “The world is a more engaging and less dramatic place than writers ever give it credit for being.”

— Richard Ford

92. “Unbridled commerce isn’t generally pretty, but it’s always forward-thinking.”

— Richard Ford

93. “My always needn’t be forever. I’m ready for the plunge, nervy as a cliff-diver. Though if down the line things go rotten we can both climb the cliffs again. Life is long.”

— Richard Ford

94. “You survived. Whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, right?” I don’t, of course, believe this. Most things that don’t kill us right off, kill us later.”

— Richard Ford

95. “Writing is the only thing I’ve ever done with persistence, except for being married.”

— Richard Ford

96. “Writing never came naturally and I still have to force my hand to do it.”

— Richard Ford

97. “In order to write novels for a living – it’s not pathological, but I do think and worry and brood and fidget about stuff that I’m working on.”

— Richard Ford

98. “It’s odd how our fears, the ones we didn’t know we had, alter our sight line and make us see things that never were.”

— Richard Ford

99. “We do not, after all, deal in truths, only potentialities. Too much truth can be worse than death, and last longer.”

— Richard Ford

100. “Theres a lot to be said for doing what youre not supposed to do, and the rewards of doing what youre supposed to do are more subtle and take longer to become apparent, which maybe makes it less attractive. But your life is the blueprint you make after the building is built.”

— Richard Ford