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

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

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

— Richard Russo

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

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

— Richard Russo

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

— Richard Russo

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

— Richard Russo

165. “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

166. “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

167. “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

168. “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

169. “Like many fathers, Lincoln’s now had two permanent residences – one in Dunbar, Arizona, the other in his only son’s head.”

— Richard Russo

170. “I’ve got Abba in my head,” she told him. “Make them go away.”

— Richard Russo

171. “Like so many men who resent the authority of others, Big Jim hated for his own to be questioned.”

— Richard Russo

172. “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

173. “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

174. “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

175. “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

176. “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

177. “What kind of town? What kind of country? What kind of people? If my father had been on the courthouse steps that day, he might have been able to summon his deeply held conviction that ours was a good town, a good country, and that we were good people, but I couldn’t think what to say, and Gabriel seemed grateful that things made no better sense to me than they did to him.”

— Richard Russo

178. “A bicycle promises spring as surely as the hollowing out of melting snowbanks, the return of song birds, the first bright tulip bud.”

— Richard Russo

179. “The one life we’re left with is sufficient to fill and refill our imperfect hearts with joy, and then to shatter them. And it never, ever lets up. Blame love.”

— Richard Russo

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

— Richard Russo

181. “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

182. “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

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

— Richard Russo

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

— Richard Russo

185. “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

186. “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

187. “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

188. “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

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

— Richard Russo

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

— Richard Russo

191. “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

192. “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

193. “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

194. “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

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

— Richard Russo

196. “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

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

— Richard Russo

198. “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

199. “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

200. “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