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

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

— Richard Russo

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

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

— Richard Russo

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

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

— Richard Russo

162. “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

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

— Richard Russo

164. “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

165. “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

166. “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

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

— Richard Russo

168. “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

169. “Wondrous! he thought, how the heart leaps when one is chosen, especially later in life, after one would suppose the time for choosing and being chosen has passed.”

— Richard Russo

170. “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

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

174. “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

175. “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

176. “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

177. “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

178. “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

179. “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

180. “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

181. “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

182. “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

183. “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

184. “I remember vividly wishing she wouldn’t do that, that she’d let him arrange his thoughts and feelings the way he wanted. After all, how does one invalidate a powerful feeling? Not with logic, surely.”

— Richard Russo

185. “The fact that the two were friends added a bittersweet quality and made the whole thing seem even more noble. The fact that so much damage had been traded over a girl elevated the contest into the realm of heroism.”

— Richard Russo

186. “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

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

— Richard Russo

188. “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

189. “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

190. “They got their own name in French,” she reminded Miss Beryl, stealthily exchanging her soiled cloth napkin for a fresh one at an adjacent table. “Escargot.” There’s also a word in English, Miss Beryl had pointed out. Snail. Probably horse doo had a name in French also, but that didn’t mean God intended for you to eat it.”

— Richard Russo

191. “No, you wish. You have to be careful of wishing. It can hurt. It’s better to wait until you know. Waiting for your father to turn up won’t make him do it.”

— Richard Russo

192. “She loves you,” he said, then added sadly, “More than anybody.” “I know,” I admitted, suddenly feeling the terrible weight of her love, threatening to rip through the thin fabric of lies and deception that it rested on. “I wish to God she didn’t.”

— Richard Russo

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

— Richard Russo

194. “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

195. “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

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

— Richard Russo

197. “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

198. “Neither beauty nor innocence nor the best of intentions can alter that which has always been.”

— Richard Russo

199. “Enduring what couldn’t be cured, she supposed, was what people meant by being adult, though it was ironic that so few of them – including her parents – had mastered the skill themselves.”

— Richard Russo

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

— Richard Russo