Top 250 Richard Russo Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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 That it hasn’t been replaced by a reality we’re less fully committed to?”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

202. “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

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

206. “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

207. “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

208. “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

209. “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

210. “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

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

— Richard Russo

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

217. “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

218. “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

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

— Richard Russo

220. “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

221. “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

222. “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

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

226. “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

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

— Richard Russo

228. “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

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

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

— Richard Russo

232. “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

233. “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

234. “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

235. “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

236. “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

237. “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

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

— Richard Russo

239. “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

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

— Richard Russo

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

— Richard Russo

242. “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

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

— Richard Russo

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

— Richard Russo

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

— Richard Russo

246. “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

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

— Richard Russo

248. “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

249. “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

250. “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