Top 250 Richard Russo Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

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

— Richard Russo

204. “David has this theory that between your mom and dad and him and you there’s, like, one complete person. Your father never thinks about anybody but himself, and your mom is always thinking about other people and never herself. David thinks only about the present and you only think about the past and the future.”

— Richard Russo

205. “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

206. “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

207. “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

208. “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

209. “You look like your mom,” he said, smiling.”

— Richard Russo

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

— Richard Russo

211. “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

212. “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

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

— Richard Russo

214. “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

215. “Maybe the bad things didn’t mean anything, as my father said, but in my head they kept trying to.”

— Richard Russo

216. “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

217. “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

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

— Richard Russo

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

— Richard Russo

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

— Richard Russo

221. “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

222. “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

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

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 “No, most adults are like her father, whose fear, if he feels any, has been replaced by a kind of melancholy.”

— Richard Russo

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

— Richard Russo

228. “The Decemberists. Belle and Sebastian. Mumford and Sons.”

— Richard Russo

229. “Was this how wars happened, the seeds of conflict, large and small, growing in the gap between what people wanted to believe and what they feared must be true?”

— Richard Russo

230. “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

231. “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

232. “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

233. “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

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

— Richard Russo

235. “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

236. “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

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

— Richard Russo

238. “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

239. “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

240. “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

241. “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

242. “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

243. “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

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

— Richard Russo

245. “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

246. “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

247. “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

248. “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

249. “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

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

— Richard Russo