Top 250 Richard Russo Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

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

— Richard Russo

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

— Richard Russo

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

— Richard Russo

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

165. “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

166. “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

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

— Richard Russo

168. “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

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

172. “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

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

— Richard Russo

174. “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

175. “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

176. “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

177. “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

178. “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

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

— Richard Russo

180. “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

181. “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

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

— Richard Russo

183. “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

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

— Richard Russo

185. “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

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

— Richard Russo

187. “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

188. “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

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. “A writer has to see things twice. First the thing itself, then its potential for a story. What he sees this second time is, in a sense, who he is. It’s his artistic personality. What he doesn’t see twice is just as revealing.”

— Richard Russo

191. “We even discovered that our fathers had the same favorite saying: “Money talks. It says goodbye.”

— Richard Russo

192. “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

193. “To see a life back to front, as everyone begins to do in middle age, is to strip it of its mystery and wrap it in inevitability, drama’s enemy.”

— Richard Russo

194. “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

195. “But for some reason, these periods of melancholy were important to him, and he rode them out the way some people did migraines.”

— Richard Russo

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

— Richard Russo

197. “It was from my mother that I learned reading was not a duty but a reward, and from her that I intuited a vital truth: most people are trapped in a solitary existence, a life circumscribed by want and failures of imagination, limitations from which readers are exempt.”

— Richard Russo

198. “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

199. “As always, to Sully, the deepest of life’s mysteries were the mysteries of his own behavior.”

— Richard Russo

200. “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