Top 250 Richard Russo Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “For years now he’d believed he had no further urgent business with this world, or it with him. But it could be he was wrong.”

— Richard Russo

102. “Whereas some people’s attitude suggested that perhaps they knew something you didn’t, Mrs. Whiting’s implied that she knew everything you didn’t. She alone had been paying attention, so it was her duty to bring you at least partially up to speed.”

— Richard Russo

103. “I just have this feeling that if it weren’t for the Gloversville Free Library that I probably would not be a writer.”

— Richard Russo

104. “He was an amiable man who believed in amiable solutions, who forgave easily and couldn’t understand that other people derived pleasure from withholding the very thing he always gave so freely.”

— Richard Russo

105. “Lest it seem that I was neglected, I should point out that once I became known to the Mohawk Grill crowd, it was like having about two dozen more or less negligent fathers whose slender attentions and vague goodwill nevertheless added up.”

— Richard Russo

106. “For people who dealt largely in dreams, his father was fond of observing, realtors were a surprisingly unromantic bunch, like card counters in a Vegas casino.”

— Richard Russo

107. “I looked back at some of my earlier published stories with genuine horror and remorse. I got thinking, How many extant copies might there be, who owns them, and do they keep their doors locked?”

— Richard Russo

108. “Hell, at twenty, he’d been ready to junk everything and start over too. But now, at sixty, he was less willing to throw things away that could be patched together and kept running for a few more months. He wanted to keep going forward, not stop and turn around and analyze the validity of decisions made and courses charted long ago.”

— Richard Russo

109. “Also her perfume, which mingled with the crisp air off the lake below, creating an intoxicating mixture of damp earth and leaves and water and girl. Not woman, in Sully’s opinion. Girl.”

— Richard Russo

110. “I get and read an enormous number of first novels.”

— Richard Russo

111. “I think a lot of what is going on with kids who get pushed too far and attempt either murder or suicide is that they are trying to deal with their own non-existence for the people who are supposed to care most for them.”

— Richard Russo

112. “Rub wiped his nose on his sleeve. “I just wisht – ” “What?” Rub sighed. Where to begin? “That I’d be nicer to you?” He shrugged again, but this was the gist of it, Sully could tell. “I wish I would, too,” he said, and for some reason this seemed to cheer Rub up.”

— Richard Russo

113. “To his surprise, she leaned over and kissed him on the forehead, a kiss so full of affection that it dispelled the awkwardness, even as it caused Miles’ heart to plummet, because all kisses are calibrated, and this one revealed the great chasm between affection and love.”

— Richard Russo

114. “It’s no secret that in my books I’m trying to make the comic and the serious rub up against each other just as closely and uncomfortably as I can.”

— Richard Russo

115. “By ignoring a lot of American culture you can write more interesting stories. Unfortunately, if you were writing about America as it is, you’d be writing about a lot of people sitting in front of television sets.”

— Richard Russo

116. “There are a great many sins in this world, none of them original.”

— Richard Russo

117. “Steve Yarbrough’s Safe from the Neighbors will take your breath away. Ambitious, funny, sad, smart, and beautifully crafted, it’s everything a novel should be.”

— Richard Russo

118. “Alas, he himself was a man too easily encouraged, too completely seduced by hope, only to be devastated by disappointment. He’d been born to privilege, conditioned to expect things would go well, and pathetically unable to cope once they started to go wrong.”

— Richard Russo

119. “No, Sully’d decided long ago to abstain from all but the most general forms of regret. He allowed himself the vague wish that things had turned out differently, without blaming himself that they hadn’t, any more than he’d blamed himself when his 1-2-3 triple never ran like it should at least once. It didn’t pay to second-guess every one of life’s decisions, to pretend to wisdom about the past from the safety of the present, the way so many people did when they got older.”

— Richard Russo

120. “Intellectual curiosity, moreover, was not the same as talent, and he gradually came to understand that his own particular aptitude was for fixing things. From an early age he’d possessed an intuitive grasp of how and why things went off the rails, as well as how to get them back on again. He enjoyed taking things apart and putting them back together.”

— Richard Russo

121. “My favorite teacher in college advised me not to write a book until it was impossible not to.”

— Richard Russo

122. “Lincoln chuckled yet again. “What’s that poem you’re always quoting? About parents?” Teddy nodded. “Larkin.”

— Richard Russo

123. “I don’t think America has ever had a center the way London is the center of England or Dublin is the center of Ireland.”

— Richard Russo

124. “True, Jedediah Halsey’s Sans Souci hadn’t been so much foolish as “visionary,” which, as everyone knew, was what you called a foolish idea that worked anyway.”

— Richard Russo

125. “He often did offend women without meaning to or even knowing how he’d managed.”

— Richard Russo

126. “More painful than her naivete is the fact that she doesn’t believe herself to be naive. Should you make the mistake of asking her why she’s doing something so stupid, she’ll explain it to you.”

— Richard Russo

127. “There are no compelling reasons for matrimony,” Jacob admits. “Getting married is something you do despite compelling reasons.”

— Richard Russo

128. “I also think it’s possible for us to be better people tomorrow than we are today.” He had no idea, of course, whether any of these things were true, in whole or in part. Still, what possible good could come of believing otherwise? –.”

— Richard Russo

129. “That, very simply, was what adulthood must be all about – acquiring the skill to bury things more deeply. Out of sight and, whenever possible, out of mind.”

— Richard Russo

130. “David has this theory that between your mom and dad and him and you there’s, like, one complete person. Your father never thinks about anybody but himself, and your mom is always thinking about other people and never herself. David thinks only about the present and you only think about the past and the future.”

— Richard Russo

131. “The Decemberists. Belle and Sebastian. Mumford and Sons.”

— Richard Russo

132. “It’s none of your business anyhow,” Wirf said. Words to live by, Sully had to admit. But he kept hearing Peter’s mockery. Not really his dog. Not really his house. Not really his business. And there were other not reallys as well. There.”

— Richard Russo

133. “But it was a nice way of ignoring another simple truth – that people changed, with or without wars, and that we sometimes don’t know people as well as we think we do, that the worst errors in judgment often result from imagining we understand what has escaped us entirely.”

— Richard Russo

134. “Sully grinned down at her. “We wear the chains we forge in life, old girl.” Miss Beryl blinked. “Who’d have thunk it? A literary allusion from the lips of Donald Sullivan. I don’t suppose you remember who said that.” “You did,” Sully reminded her. “All through eighth grade.”

— Richard Russo

135. “You want a poke in the eye with a sharp stick?” Sully offered. “You don’t have a stick,” Will pointed out.”

— Richard Russo

136. “What made the contest between fate and free will so lopsided was that human beings invariably mistook one for the other, hurling themselves furiously against that which is fixed and immutable while ignoring the very things over which.”

— Richard Russo

137. “Nor do I want the woman that I’m married to and that I love to leave me, but the thought of her doing so moves me in a way that our growing old together and contentedly slipping, in affectionate tandem, toward the grave does not.”

— Richard Russo

138. “I’ve always liked Billy, and now I like him even more. It’s a hell of a fine man who’ll write a novel and keep it to himself.”

— Richard Russo

139. “Outside of a dog,” Teddy said, wiggling his eyebrows and puffing on an imaginary Groucho cigar, a whole other Marx than the one Mickey alluded to, “a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.”

— Richard Russo

140. “Was this how wars happened, the seeds of conflict, large and small, growing in the gap between what people wanted to believe and what they feared must be true?”

— Richard Russo

141. “After all, diminishment seemed to be the order of the day. Wouldn’t you think the spirit, unshackled at last from so many of the body’s youthful imperatives and bolstered by the wisdom of experience, would finally become ascendant? Wasn’t memory, that bully and oppressor, supposed to become soft and spongy?”

— Richard Russo

142. “Miles smiled and gave her a kiss on top of the head, breathing her in, this kid who wasn’t a kid anymore but still smelled like one. Everything about his daughter seemed just about right, including the way the second thing she said often contradicted the first. Things were going okay. Except they weren’t.”

— Richard Russo

143. “It’s a terrible thing to be a disappointment to a good woman.”

— Richard Russo

144. “You guess,” Janine repeated. “Is there somebody who’d know for sure? Somebody we could consult for a definitive answer?”

— Richard Russo

145. “He’s got a good, righteous head of steam up, and I envy him this. He’s saying things that friendship has kept him from saying for twenty years, and their release at this late date is orgasmic. Asking him to stop would be like asking him to pull out.”

— Richard Russo

146. “Contemplation was like sitting on a committee that seldom made recommendations and was ignored when it did, a committee that lacked even the authority to disband.”

— Richard Russo

147. “But six months always seemed a long way off to Sully, who was by and large an optimist and who always concluded that in six months he’d be better off than he was now for the simple reason that he couldn’t be any worse off.”

— Richard Russo

148. “Still, what made people tick was no great mystery, was it? Greed. Lust. Anger. Jealousy. You could almost let your voice fall right there. Love? Some people claimed it made the world go round, but he wasn’t so sure about that. Love mostly turned out to be one of those other emotions, or a mixture of them, in disguise. Even if it did exist, Raymer doubted its relevance to much of anything.”

— Richard Russo

149. “Maybe, as the old lady had suggested, it was all that catechism, its rote insistence on subordinating one’s will to God’s, so many of these lessons administered by the now senile priest who was seated a few yards away and giving him the evil eye. What in the world could these old goats have been discussing, Miles wondered.”

— Richard Russo

150. “I know,” Peter said, zipping Will’s jacket. The little boy, who had apparently had his throat zipped into his zipper at some point, always put his mittened hand beneath his chin to prevent it from happening again. Sully.”

— Richard Russo