Top 250 Richard Russo Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “Throughout his life a case study underachiever, Sully – people still remarked – was nobody’s fool, a phrase that Sully no doubt appreciated without ever sensing its literal application – that at sixty, he was divorced from his own wife, carrying on halfheartedly with another man’s, estranged from his son, devoid of self-knowledge, badly crippled and virtually unemployable – all of which he stubbornly confused with independence.”

— Richard Russo

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

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

— Richard Russo

109. “I suppose all writers worry about the well running dry.”

— Richard Russo

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

113. “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

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

— Richard Russo

115. “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

116. “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

117. “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

118. “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

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

— Richard Russo

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

— Richard Russo

121. “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

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

— Richard Russo

123. “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

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. “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

126. “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

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

— Richard Russo

128. “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

129. “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

130. “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

131. “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

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

— Richard Russo

133. “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

134. “Since turning in his resignation, he’d been wondering what he might do next. Suddenly his path seemed clear. He would become an alcoholic. He.”

— Richard Russo

135. “Is good fiction more likely to be about the air we breathe or the nose we breathe it through?”

— Richard Russo

136. “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

137. “The loss of a place isn’t really so different from the loss of a person. Both disappear without permission, leaving the self diminished, in need of testimony and evidence. This happened. I was there.”

— Richard Russo

138. “Sometimes,” Tria said, rolling over onto her back again and staring up at the ceiling, “I think that Mother is right about him being empty because I feel so empty myself.” She looked over at me in the semidark with the same scared look she’d had as a girl learning to drive. “Do you ever feel like you’re nobody at all?” “No,” I admitted. “There are times when I feel like I’m somebody I don’t like very much.” “But always somebody,” she said sadly, then added, “I never dislike myself.”

— Richard Russo

139. “It was Miss Beryl’s view that anything involving crowds of jostling bargain seekers wouldn’t be a bargain.”

— Richard Russo

140. “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

141. “Still, Yolanda appreciated the fact that her meds allowed her to go among other people, who would treat her, when she was medicated, much like they would treat any other big-boned, over-weight girl with straight, mouse-brown hair, who lumbered across floors so heavily that objects rattled and the surfaces of liquid in glasses boiled. It was a relief not to be viewed as someone with special problems.”

— Richard Russo

142. “Grace believed that those who could see their duty clearly were required by God to do the heavy lifting for the morally blind. Where.”

— Richard Russo

143. “His mother’s position was that his father could come back and live with them again as soon as he grew up, but not until. His father had predicted that his mother would kiss his ass before he’d ever walk through that door again. Both of these, Lin had concluded, were highly unlikely events.”

— Richard Russo

144. “At three in the morning Main Street was so quiet that Dallas could hear the street light change from red to green a block away. There was nothing sadder and lonelier in the world, he decided, especially when you were all alone when it happened.”

— Richard Russo

145. “Had I been more, I’d be more. Simple.”

— Richard Russo

146. “Sully always maintained that if you had ten guys working on a rock pile, Rub would be the last you’d fire for laziness. Only when you’d fired all the others would you realize that Rub had not yet addressed his first rock.”

— Richard Russo

147. “This was what Miss Beryl had been coming back to, all day, all her life probably, to the mystery of affection, of the heart inclining in one direction and not another, of its unexpected, unwished-for pirouettes, its ability to make a fool, a villain, of its owner, if indeed any human can be said to own his heart. “I know this,” she’d told Clive Sr. that long-ago afternoon. “Love is a stupid thing.”

— Richard Russo

148. “It seemed probable to me that my companion on the bus had lost someone, and that the loss had changed everything, created a truth that could not be modified, only accepted, reread.”

— Richard Russo

149. “But I’ll feel better about you in Connecticut. People sometimes get in the habit of being loyal to a mistake. They can devote their whole lives to it.”

— Richard Russo

150. “That she should so puzzled him that he even questioned his behavior, entertaining, albeit briefly, the idea that he might in some fashion be responsible for the apparition of his once loving wife, who had faithfully awaited his return from overseas, now calmly and purposefully blasting away, without visible remorse, in the general direction of his life and property. They.”

— Richard Russo