Top 250 Richard Russo Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Maybe the bad things didn’t mean anything, as my father said, but in my head they kept trying to.”

— Richard Russo

202. “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

203. “In fact, he’d admitted as much when the subject of his mother had come up in one of their early sessions. Of course it came up. Would therapy even exist without mothers?”

— Richard Russo

204. “Perhaps he was frightened by the sheer prospect of matrimony, of marrying a girl he would one day want to murder.”

— Richard Russo

205. “Indeed, a good hint that you’ve entered the realm of Art is that you immediately feel like giving up.”

— Richard Russo

206. “There were solutions. Some you discovered, some you made, some you willed, some you forced.”

— Richard Russo

207. “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

208. “We stand before a hundred doors, choose to enter one, where we’re faced with a hundred more and then choose again. We choose not just what we’ll do, but who we’ll be. Perhaps the sound of all those doors swinging shut behind us each time we select this one.”

— Richard Russo

209. “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

210. “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

211. “The line of gray along the horizon is brighter now, and with the coming light I feel a certainty: that there is, despite our wild imaginings, only one life. The ghostly others, no matter how real they seem, no matter how badly we need them, are phantoms. 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.”

— Richard Russo

212. “No, most adults are like her father, whose fear, if he feels any, has been replaced by a kind of melancholy.”

— Richard Russo

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

— Richard Russo

214. “Randall continued to hear the fundamental insincerity of the man, but also knew that the most effective lies were those liberally laced with truth. The lie could be ninety-nine parts truth to one part falsehood, the one tarnished part mingling with the pure until it was all tainted, more false than pure fabrication.”

— Richard Russo

215. “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

216. “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

217. “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

218. “What did it mean that he had so little access to something as straightforward as what he really wanted?”

— Richard Russo

219. “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

220. “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

221. “There was something about educated people that made it impossible for them to admit when they didn’t understand something.”

— Richard Russo

222. “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

223. “Hattie was an institution in Bath, and besides, everybody romanticized old people, seeing in them their own lost parents and grandparents, most of whom had bequeathed to their children the usual legacy of guilt, along with the gift of selective recollection. Most fathers and mothers did their children the great favor of dying before they began fouling themselves, before their children learned to equate them with urine-soaked undergarments and other grim realities of age and infirmity.”

— Richard Russo

224. “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

225. “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

226. “The best she was able to do was to reflect that people invariably exhibited the very worst side of their flawed natures when invited to put their thoughts into writing, especially when the invitation was sanctioned hit-and-run posing as democracy in action. Here.”

— Richard Russo

227. “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

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

— Richard Russo

229. “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

230. “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

231. “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

232. “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

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

— Richard Russo

234. “No. Simplicity and justice require that thought and deed not be carelessly elided.”

— Richard Russo

235. “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

236. “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

237. “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

238. “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

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

— Richard Russo

240. “Because if you were God, it stood to reason your real enemy would be boredom. Sully.”

— Richard Russo

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

— Richard Russo

242. “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

243. “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

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

— Richard Russo

245. “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

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

— Richard Russo

247. “The loss of a place isn’t really so different from the loss of a person. Both disappear without permission, leaving the self diminished, in need of testimony and evidence. This happened. I was there.”

— Richard Russo

248. “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

249. “It was Miss Beryl’s view that anything involving crowds of jostling bargain seekers wouldn’t be a bargain.”

— Richard Russo

250. “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