Top 250 Richard Russo Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 5 of 6

201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

206. “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

207. “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

208. “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

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

— Richard Russo

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

— Richard Russo

211. “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

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

— Richard Russo

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

— Richard Russo

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

— Richard Russo

215. “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

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

— Richard Russo

217. “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

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

— Richard Russo

219. “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

220. “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

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

— Richard Russo

222. “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

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. “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

225. “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

226. “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

227. “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

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

— Richard Russo

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

— Richard Russo

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

— Richard Russo

231. “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

232. “Grace believed that those who could see their duty clearly were required by God to do the heavy lifting for the morally blind. Where.”

— Richard Russo

233. “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

234. “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

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

— Richard Russo

237. “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

238. “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

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

— Richard Russo

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

— Richard Russo

242. “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

243. “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

244. “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

245. “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

246. “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

247. “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

248. “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

249. “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

250. “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