Top 120 Richard Ford Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

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

— Richard Ford

103. “It’s not an unusual American story. Just as there’s no right way to plan a life and no right way to live one – only plenty of wrong ways.”

— Richard Ford

104. “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

105. “Our parents’ lives, even those enfolded in obscurity, offer us our first, strong assurance that human events have consequence. Here we are, after all.”

— Richard Ford

106. “It was on such a night as this that the unhappy things came about.”

— Richard Ford

107. “On writing: I don’t like doing this, but it feels so good when I stop.”

— Richard Ford

108. “I believe in what you see being most of what there is, as I’ve taught my students, and that life’s passed along to us empty. So, while significance weighs heavy, that’s the most it does. Hidden meaning is all but absent.”

— Richard Ford

109. “Possibly this is one more version of “disappearing into your life”, the way career telephone company bigwigs, overdutiful parents and owners of wholesale lumber companies are said to do and never know it. You simply reach a point at which everything looks the same but nothing matters much. There’s no evidence you’re dead, but you act that way.”

— Richard Ford

110. “Though when I turn to regard life – my own or others’ – I now never fail to be struck, amid the onslaught of all that’s happened and still is happening, by how much that’s gone from me. Absences seem to surround and intrude upon everything. Though in acknowledging this, I cannot let it be a loss or even be a fact I regret, since that is merely how life is – another enduring truth we must notice.”

— Richard Ford

111. “Your life doesn’t mean what you have or what you get. Its what your’e willing to give up.”

— Richard Ford

112. “The things you’ll never do don’t get decided at the end of life, but somewhere in the long gray middle, where you can’t see the dim light at either end.”

— Richard Ford

113. “You can’t always go to the well and have things be funny.”

— Richard Ford

114. “There is no urge to touch, to kiss, to embrace. But I do it just the same. It is our last charm. Love isn’t a thing, after all, but an endless series of single acts.”

— Richard Ford

115. “Very early you come to the realization that nothing will ever take you away from yourself.”

— Richard Ford

116. “Somehow, and for no apparent reason, your decisions got tipped over and you lost your hold. And one day you woke up and you found yourself in the very situation you said you would never ever be in, and you did not know what was most important to you anymore. And after that, it was all over. And I did not want that to happen to me did not, in fact, think it ever would.”

— Richard Ford

117. “I do not hold to the old belief that professors like writers because they can see us fail in a grander and sillier and therefore more unequivocal way than they have. On the contrary, they like to see someone trying, giving it all up to set a permanent mark.”

— Richard Ford

118. “It was such a thing to see, a view I had never seen and have not since.”

— Richard Ford

119. “Most things don’t stay the way they are very long.”

— Richard Ford

120. “It’s shocking to note how close we play to unwelcome realizations, and yet how our ongoing ignorance makes so much of life possible.”

— Richard Ford

121. “Dreaminess is, among other things, a state of suspended recognition, and a response to too much useless and complicated factuality. Its symptoms can be a long-term interest in the weather, or a sustained soaring feeling, or a bout of the stares that you sometimes can not even know about except in retrospect, when the time may seem fogged.”

— Richard Ford

122. “And I knew that was not a bad thing at all, not for anyone, in any life.”

— Richard Ford

123. “Would you think he was anybody like you?”

— Richard Ford

124. “I don’t know what makes people do what they do, or call themselves what they call themselves, only that you have to live someone’s life to be the expert.”

— Richard Ford

125. “America beats on you so hard the whole time. You are constantly being pummeled by other people’s rights and their sense of patriotism.”

— Richard Ford

126. “Together – though perhaps only together – they were fully formed. They stayed on the road. Life went on as it had, from the thirties straight into the forties. They owned little – a bit of furniture, their clothes, no car.”

— Richard Ford

127. “Anyone could be anyone else in most ways. Face the facts.”

— Richard Ford

128. “Greater challenges might only have frustrated him and rendered him unhappy.”

— Richard Ford

129. “But if I had to I would say that because I was his son, I can recognize now that life is short and has inadequacies, that once again it requires crucial avoidances as well as fillings-in to be acceptable.”

— Richard Ford