Top 250 Richard Russo Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

154. “Slow” works on an altogether different principle, on the deceptive impression that there’s plenty of time to prepare, which conceals the central fact, that no matter how slow things go, you’ll always be slower.”

— Richard Russo

155. “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

156. “The more he thought about it, life’s truest meanings were all childhood meanings, childhood understandings of how things worked, what they were. Do we ever know as deeply as we know in childhood? Does adult life amount to anything more than a futile attempt to invalidate the deepest truths we know about ourselves and our world?”

— Richard Russo

157. “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

158. “Tell me something,” she said, before he closed the door. “What were you like when you were young?” “Just like this,” he said. “Only more.”

— Richard Russo

159. “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

160. “Like many men addicted to sports, Clive Sr. was also a religious man and one who’d been raised to accept life’s mysteries – the Blessed Trinity, for one instance, a woman’s reasoning, for another.”

— Richard Russo

161. “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

162. “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

163. “Miss Beryl was not unaware of Mr. Wirfly’s shortcomings, but she steadfastly maintained that he was not so much incompetent as unambitious, a character trait almost impossible to find in a lawyer.”

— Richard Russo

164. “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

165. “He’d imagined the world would be a better place when it was rid of Big Jim Sullivan, but it had remained pretty much the same place, with just one less person to blame things on.”

— Richard Russo

166. “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

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

— Richard Russo

168. “When you tossed pebbles down from the embankment, they believed in God. One.”

— Richard Russo

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

— Richard Russo

170. “This would be especially true of overeducated people, who are capable of thinking past the immediate, of becoming obsessed by the remote.”

— Richard Russo

171. “Shush, Isobel,” the priest told her. “When such terrible things leave your tongue, they fly directly to God’s ear.” She had stood then and turned, peering into the darkness of the church for Sully, who had sunk down into his pew. “What difference?” she said. “God isn’t listening.”

— Richard Russo

172. “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

173. “Golf was not a game he’d ever particularly wanted to take up. Nobody he liked had ever played golf, and a lot of the people he disliked intensely played all the time.”

— Richard Russo

174. “As a boy, he had not realized what his father must have known, that pain could have a cumulative effect. Your ability to withstand it had much to do with your ability to catch your breath between its assaults.”

— Richard Russo

175. “But eating with genuine good appetite is no easy thing when you are seated at the opposite end of a long table from a man who makes it a point of moral significance to subsist on half a grapefruit, eaten in under a minute so that the bowl could be pushed emphatically away, another duty done.”

— Richard Russo

176. “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

177. “Let us not forget Colby and the liberating effects of higher education. Though it doesn’t liberate everyone, does it?”

— Richard Russo

178. “At 53, she was through with the foolishness of men’s genitals. In fact, it had been many years since she had cared what hairy things dangled between their pale, scrawny legs. She now considered the fact that she had ever cared a kind of temporary lunacy and was thankful that her madness had been short lived, not terribly virulent and ultimately cured by marriage as God intended.”

— Richard Russo

179. “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

180. “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

181. “The old woman could inspire random violence moment to moment, but for the big things could be counted on, provided that sacrifice and not intervention was called for. Anne smiled to herself. There was, after all, something to be said for sacrifice.”

— Richard Russo

182. “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

183. “Bottomless need. What Miss Rosa didn’t seem to understand was that this accurately described not only most children but also the scared child that lived, at least part of the time, deep inside most adults.”

— Richard Russo

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

— Richard Russo

185. “Here was a wish from another lifetime, granted twenty-five years too late, as if God were in a place so distant that it took almost forever for wishes to travel there, like pale starlight from a distant galaxy, eons old and all worn out even as we look at it. I.”

— Richard Russo

186. “Later in life, he was fond of remarking, rather ruefully, that he always had the last word in all differences of opinion with his wife, and that – two words, actually – was, “Yes, dear.”

— Richard Russo

187. “Over graduation weekend Jacy learned something about loneliness that she hadn’t suspected before: that its most terrifying and virulent form could only be experienced in a crowd.”

— Richard Russo

188. “They would be on the brink of a serious falling out when suddenly the danger would pass as if it had never existed – “like a fart in a gale of wind,” as Dan liked to say. He had a way of saying the most patently offensive things, plain or profane, without offending. A rare gift, she concluded. The other men in her life somehow always managed to offend even when they were tiptoeing.”

— Richard Russo

189. “He hadn’t even advised Peter about the existence of such women as this one he’d fallen in with, the kind who could make a man feel like something not quite a man and accomplish it in a way no other man, however jeering and contemptuous, could do.”

— Richard Russo

190. “If you were going to be reckless in this life, you needed total commitment to the principle.”

— Richard Russo

191. “I just heard Mother in the bathroom,” she said, up on one elbow to smooth hair away from my forehead, a gentle, wonderful intimacy that took my breath away.”

— Richard Russo

192. “Sully understood this to be true, though it was a fairly recent phenomenon. Ruth had witnessed and reported it with considerable irritation. It couldn’t have been the case when he was married to Vera, because his wife had kept a careful, detailed list of the things he did of which she disapproved, and she was not the sort of woman to hold anything back. She surely would have mentioned it if he’d slept with his eyes open.”

— Richard Russo

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

— Richard Russo

194. “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

195. “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

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

— Richard Russo

197. “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

198. “There was nothing like fear to make democracy real.”

— Richard Russo

199. “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

200. “You know my thoughts on arming morons,” he’d once remarked from the bench after Raymer, then a young officer, had accidentally discharged his weapon, the wayward bullet narrowly missing an old woman seated on her commode half a block away. “If you arm one, you have to arm them all. Otherwise, it isn’t even good sport.”

— Richard Russo