Top 250 Richard Russo Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “What was life but good barstools and bad ones, good fortune and bad, shifting from Sunday to Sunday, year to year, like the fortunes of the New England Patriots. There was no such thing as continual good fortune – or misfortune, except for the Red Sox, whose curse seemed eternal.”

— Richard Russo

154. “Why does a rich country like ours blame people who have nothing for its problems?”

— Richard Russo

155. “It wasn’t that he denied that he owed Rub an apology. He just hated to establish an ugly precedent of public apology, which could conceivably open the floodgates to other forms of regret.”

— Richard Russo

156. “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

157. “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

158. “People for whom summer wasn’t a verb.”

— Richard Russo

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

— Richard Russo

160. “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

161. “He knew from his experience overseas that if you only got shot by people aiming at you specifically, war wouldn’t have been nearly such a hazardous affair.”

— Richard Russo

162. “Who are you talking to?” “This goose,” I assure him. And in fact he looks relieved. “I was afraid you were talking to yourself.”

— Richard Russo

163. “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

164. “Maybe, like children, we assume ourselves to be of central importance, and we’re not. Maybe the inequities that consume us here on earth aren’t really the issue.”

— Richard Russo

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

— Richard Russo

166. “The streets west of Main were older and less symmetrical than those east. They turned around and in upon themselves, as if they’d been laid out by a drunk and then paved by a man who understood him perfectly.”

— Richard Russo

167. “Once she started going to church, she couldn’t stop. She attended Mass the way drunks went on binges. She couldn’t get enough. In church she felt safe and secure. Not even my father would dare violate its cool, dark sanctity. She took me along for company.”

— Richard Russo

168. “They might have been interesting if the people beneath had done the writing, but the living had nothing worthwhile to say about the dead.”

— Richard Russo

169. “The problem with trying to gauge mathematical probability was that it presupposed the circumstance you were observing was governed by chance.”

— Richard Russo

170. “The more you had, it seemed to me, the larger your border that needed defending.”

— Richard Russo

171. “He couldn’t very well start lecturing the boy now. There was every reason to believe that the first thirty-five years of Peter’s life had been the formative ones.”

— Richard Russo

172. “How, he couldn’t help wondering, did you get to be this woman’s age and still believe, as she apparently did, that everything meant something? She was obviously one of those people who just soldiered on, determined to believe whatever gave them comfort in the face of all contrary evidence. And maybe that wasn’t so dumb. The attraction of cynicism was that it so often put you in the right, as if being right led directly to happiness.”

— Richard Russo

173. “The cutthroat savagery of high school romance inspired in nearly all adults a collective amnesia.”

— Richard Russo

174. “A silly lie. A lie so small and to so little purpose that it suggested to Miles a way of life, a strategy for confronting the world, and this was further reason – if any was needed – to doubt the truth of everything the man had said inside.”

— Richard Russo

175. “It was for this reason he’d always felt that owning things was overrated. All you were doing was alleviating the disappointment of not owning them.”

— Richard Russo

176. “Of late, Mrs. Grouse had come to see virtually everything he enjoyed as a potential source of upset. She seemed intent on making his remaining years one long Lenten season. When he objected, she reminded him that objections were upsetting. “Send.”

— Richard Russo

177. “Many inspired plans are hatched in darkness. And once dignity is surrendered there are plenty of options.”

— Richard Russo

178. “I don’t dislike Gracie. At least I don’t dislike her when I think about her. When I’m in one place and she’s in another. It’s when she’s near enough to backhand that back-handing her always seems like a good idea. This is true of several of my colleagues, actually, though they don’t bother me in the abstract.”

— Richard Russo

179. “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

180. “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

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

— Richard Russo

182. “In my own way, I too was unable to execute his wishes. He’d begged me before I left that afternoon when he’d tried to go home to stay away from the hospital, now that it was just a matter of time. But I couldn’t, and toward the end I saw in his eyes each time that I appeared beside his bed that he was glad to see me, and scared as hell of dying alone. Which he ended up doing anyway. The.”

— Richard Russo

183. “My father’s ideas about debt were vague, cosmic. He figured if you had money and somebody needed some, you gave it to him, at least if the guy was all right and would do the same for you. Later on, if you needed it and he had it you could call on him. In the meantime, if you didn’t need it, you left him alone.”

— Richard Russo

184. “Protection was my strong suit. I needed something to be protected from. I.”

— Richard Russo

185. “These days his own storytelling was undermined by his stammer, as well as by his conviction that a story had to be true.”

— Richard Russo

186. “I cannot imagine that my confessions impressed the good Monsignor, but for one reason or another, I was made an altar boy, and thereby brought into the inner sanctum of the church behind the lighted sacristy door. It was a profound disappointment. Nothing mysterious happened there, and if any plotting was done, I wasn’t privy to it.”

— Richard Russo

187. “Even pain was preferable to numbness, at least for a while, and hope, once indulged, was only as delicious as it was short-lived.”

— Richard Russo

188. “Was this what we wanted from our oldest friends? Reassurance that the world we remember so fondly still exists? That it hasn’t been replaced by a reality we’re less fully committed to?”

— Richard Russo

189. “Vera had often awakened feeling frisky, an enthusiasm that had seldom survived breakfast. Sully attributed this to her Puritan upbringing. Some girls you just had to catch before they woke up enough to remember who they were.”

— Richard Russo

190. “When someone loves you,” she went on, “you don’t have to wish for it to be so. You just know it is.”

— Richard Russo

191. “He looks like he sucked the bottle dry about three in the morning and then stayed awake another hour or two to whistle into it.”

— Richard Russo

192. “It always amazed me how little he understood what I was feeling. It meant, among other things, that my understanding of him probably wasn’t much better.”

— Richard Russo

193. “Anne herself was no stranger to adversity, but she had always hated any situation that could only be endured. She was able to summon the necessary courage for a bold, confident stroke, but simply getting by left her dispirited, and it seemed that the older she got, the more frequent these situations became.”

— Richard Russo

194. “I’m not hurting. That’s the strange part. I don’t mind losing the house, or anything in it. I know I should, and I’ll probably feel better when I do, but right now I just feel bored. I’d even feel better if I thought there was some tragic flaw, some error in judgment I could trace everything to. If I could look back and say I’d missed a sign, and that if I hadn’t, things would’ve been different.”

— Richard Russo

195. “I began to develop a firm conviction that most efforts to teach people things were wasted. All they needed was to go off some place quiet and read. Around.”

— Richard Russo

196. “Why did people say things like that about him, Randall wondered. It was as if someone had started a rumor when he was a baby and by now everybody had heard it. He never seemed strange to himself, despite the conventional wisdom.”

— Richard Russo

197. “Laughter is often a more complex and thoughtful emotional response than tears, though we seem to believe that being moved to tears is somehow more noble.”

— Richard Russo

198. “Miss Beryl, with Clive Sr.’s star athlete for an audience, seemed actually to be arguing that government, law, even God’s own church were not always worthy of respect. In Clive Sr.’s view, if these were seriously questioned, how long would it be before football coaches came under attack as well?”

— Richard Russo

199. “We do not want what’s good for us.”

— Richard Russo

200. “It’s just that living with him – being married to him – is like being covered with these little cuts all the time. There’s no big gash you can show anybody, nothing they’d believe would really hurt. But these damn little nicks, they suck the blood right out of you.”

— Richard Russo