Top 250 Richard Russo Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

204. “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

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

— Richard Russo

206. “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

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. “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

209. “That she should so puzzled him that he even questioned his behavior, entertaining, albeit briefly, the idea that he might in some fashion be responsible for the apparition of his once loving wife, who had faithfully awaited his return from overseas, now calmly and purposefully blasting away, without visible remorse, in the general direction of his life and property. They.”

— Richard Russo

210. “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

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

— Richard Russo

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

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

— Richard Russo

216. “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

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

— Richard Russo

218. “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

219. “The more he thought about it, life’s truest meanings were all childhood meanings, childhood understandings of how things worked, what they were. 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

220. “Tell me something,” she said, before he closed the door. “What were you like when you were young?” “Just like this,” he said. “Only more.”

— Richard Russo

221. “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

222. “Slow” works on an altogether different principle, on the deceptive impression that there’s plenty of time to prepare, which conceals the central fact, that no matter how slow things go, you’ll always be slower.”

— Richard Russo

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

— Richard Russo

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

— Richard Russo

225. “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

226. “Man starts thinking this late in life, no previous experience or proper guidance, there’s no telling where it could lead.”

— Richard Russo

227. “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

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

— Richard Russo

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

— Richard Russo

230. “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

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

— Richard Russo

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

— Richard Russo

233. “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

234. “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

235. “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

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

— Richard Russo

237. “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

238. “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

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

— Richard Russo

240. “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

241. “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

242. “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

243. “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

244. “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

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

— Richard Russo

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

— Richard Russo

247. “Sully always maintained that if you had ten guys working on a rock pile, Rub would be the last you’d fire for laziness. Only when you’d fired all the others would you realize that Rub had not yet addressed his first rock.”

— Richard Russo

248. “At three in the morning Main Street was so quiet that Dallas could hear the street light change from red to green a block away. There was nothing sadder and lonelier in the world, he decided, especially when you were all alone when it happened.”

— Richard Russo

249. “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

250. “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