Top 90 Richard Yates Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “I had discovered, or rediscovered, that crying is a pleasure – that it can be a pleasure beyond all reckoning if your head is pressed in your mother’s waist and her hands are on your back, and if she happens to be wearing clean clothes.”

— Richard Yates

52. “In avoiding specific goals he had avoided specific limitations. For the time being the world, life itself, could be his chosen field.”

— Richard Yates

53. “It was turning into mindless, unrewarding work, the kind of work that makes you clumsy with fatigue and petulant with lack of progress, and it looked as if it would take all summer.”

— Richard Yates

54. “Know what we did, Lucy? You and me? We spent our whole lives yearning. Isn’t that the God damndest thing?”

— Richard Yates

55. “My time on the financial desk had become a slow ordeal of waiting for my superiors to discover more and more of how little I knew about what I was doing; and now however pathetically willing I might be to learn all the things I was supposed to know, it had become much too ludicrously late to ask.”

— Richard Yates

56. “How do you suppose we’d go about finding one?” she asked. “A psychiatrist, I mean. Aren’t a lot of them supposed to be quacks? Well, but still, I guess that isn’t really much of a problem, is it.”

— Richard Yates

57. “Never end a sentence with a preposition, Sobel. You don’t wanna say, ‘gave the plumbers new grounds to bargain on.’ You wanna say, ’gave the plumbers new grounds on which to bargain.”

— Richard Yates

58. “It took Emily a long time to realize that Sarah was dead. Sometimes, waking from a dream of childhood filled with Sarah’s face and Sarah’s voice, she would go and study her own face in the bright bathroom mirror until she found assurance that it was still the face of Sarah’s sister, and that it didn’t look old.”

— Richard Yates

59. “He watched her with murderous distaste as she fumbled with her spoon. They had ordered ice cream, and some of it clung to her lips as she rolled a cold mouthful on her tongue.”

— Richard Yates

60. “Mrs. Givings’s cosmetics seemed always to have been applied in a frenzy of haste, of impatience to get the whole silly business over and done with, and she was constantly in motion, a trim, leather-skinned woman in her fifties whose eyes expressed a religious belief in the importance of keeping busy.”

— Richard Yates

61. “Intelligent, thinking people could take things like this in their stride, just as they took the larger absurdities of deadly dull jobs in the city and deadly dull homes in the suburbs. Economic circumstances might force you to live in this environment, but the important thing was to keep from being contaminated. The important thing, always, was to remember who you were.”

— Richard Yates

62. “I see,′ she said. And when would she ever learn to stop saying ‘I see’ about things she didn’t see at all?”

— Richard Yates

63. “The place had filled him with a sense of wisdom hovering just out of reach, of unspeakable grace prepared and waiting just around the corner, but he’d walked himself weak down its endless blue streets and all the people who knew how to live had kept their tantalizing secret to themselves.”

— Richard Yates

64. “In the meantime, and this was the best part, in the meantime it was no longer necessary to dislike them.”

— Richard Yates

65. “Every man has a right to keep his own sentiments if he pleases.”

— Richard Yates

66. “And when the sobs finally begin they are long, scalding ones, the kind that come again and again.”

— Richard Yates

67. “Yes, me.” She made a claw of her hand and clutched at her collarbone. “Me. Me. Me. Oh, you poor, self-deluded – Look at you! Look at you, and tell me how by any stretch” – she tossed her head, and the grin of her teeth glistened white in the moonlight – “by any stretch of the imagination you can call yourself a man!”

— Richard Yates

68. “Your cowardly self-delusions about “love” when you know as well as I do that there’s never been anything between us but contempt and distrust and a terrible sickly dependence on each other’s weakness- that’s why. That’s why I couldn’t stop laughing about the Inability to Love, and that’s why I can’t stand to let you touch me, and that’s why I’ll never again believe in anything you think, let alone anything you say.”

— Richard Yates

69. “Some things you did were worth regretting; others not.”

— Richard Yates

70. “Everybody’s essentially alone’, she’d told him, and he was beginning to see a lot of truth in that. Besides: now that he was older, and now that he was home, it might not even matter how the story turned out in the end.”

— Richard Yates

71. “Anybody’s marriage might benefit from an occasional embargo on talk.”

— Richard Yates

72. “How could any healthy girl be expected to care for a mentally unbalanced man?”

— Richard Yates

73. “An intellectual might lose her virginity to a soldier in the park, but she could learn to look back on it with wry, amused detachment. An intellectual might have a mother who showed her underpants when drunk, but she wouldn’t let it bother her. And Emily Grimes might not be an intellectual yet, but if she took copious notes in even the dullest of her classes, and if she read every night until her eyes ached, it was only a question of time.”

— Richard Yates

74. “That’s how we both got committed to this enormous delusion – because that’s what it is, an enormous, obscene delusion – this idea that people have to resign from real life and ‘settle down’ when they have families.”

— Richard Yates

75. “Like frustrated suburban wives we fed on each other’s discontent; we became divided into mean little cliques and subdivided into jealously shifting pairs of buddies, and we pieced out our idleness with gossip.”

— Richard Yates

76. “He had torn a ragged wound in it, laying open its moist white meat, but it wouldn’t break, it wouldn’t give, and it made the children laugh each time the shovel bounced and rang in his hands. The delicate noise of their laughter, the look of their tulip-soft skin and of their two sunny skulls, as fragile as eggshell, made a terrible contrast to the feel of biting steel and shuddering pulp, and it was his sense of this that made his eyes commit a distortion of truth.”

— Richard Yates

77. “If you lived like a proletarian long enough, among proletarians, weren’t you almost certain to become a proletarian too?”

— Richard Yates

78. “There was plenty of liquor flowing, but most of it seemed to be going down my mother’s throat.”

— Richard Yates

79. “Sometimes it seemed that he’d said six or eight funny things in his life, and that what passed for his sense of humor would always depend on a skillful recycling of old material, over and over again.”

— Richard Yates

80. “Yes, but still, if it was as adult and sophisticated as all that, why couldn’t she decide what to do with her sweater? Why was she having such an awful time thinking of what in the world she could possibly say to the man?”

— Richard Yates

81. “Oh, Jesus, it was the loveliest and most terrible thing he’d ever seen; it was the source of the world; and his shame was so immediate that he let the fabric slip back into place after only a second or two.”

— Richard Yates

82. “That was when the childhood memory began to prey on his mind, for it suddenly struck him – and the force of it sent his thumbnail biting deep into the secret matchbook – that letting things happen and taking them gracefully had been, in a way, the pattern of his life. There was certainly no denying that the role of good loser had always held an inordinate appeal for him.”

— Richard Yates

83. “Surely the man was too old to be her boyfriend – he looked about fifty – but maybe he took a fatherly interest in her; maybe she had come to rely on his plain, straightforward advice in meeting the various uncertainties of her young life.”

— Richard Yates

84. “But it didn’t last.”

— Richard Yates

85. “How can you talk that way? Frank, has it gotten so bad that you’ve lost all your belief in yourself?”

— Richard Yates

86. “Our whole damn culture is geared to it; it’s the new religion; it’s everybody’s intellectual and spiritual sugar-tit.”

— Richard Yates

87. “Look, I can explain everything” was the most commonly used line of dialogue in the history of American movies.”

— Richard Yates

88. “All right,” her voice said bleakly. “All right, suppose all this is true. Suppose I’m acting out a compulsive behavior pattern, or whatever they call it. So what? I still can’t help what I feel, can I?”

— Richard Yates

89. “The sprinklers whirled at dusk on every lawn and the television droned in every living room. A woman’s only son came home insane, confronting her with God only knew what agonies of grief and guilt, and still she busied herself with the doings of the zoning board, with little chirrups of neighborly good cheer and cardboard boxes full of garden plants.”

— Richard Yates

90. “The slick, chin-high tops of cars made an undulating surface that stretched away into the darkness in all directions; beneath it stood endless shadowy ranks of fenders and fins, of intricately bulbous bumpers and grills alive with numberless points of reflected neon.”

— Richard Yates

91. “Why not let well enough alone? As an intense, nicotine-stained, Jean-Paul Sartre sort of man, wasn’t it simple logic to expect that he’d be limited to intense, nicotine-stained, Jean-Paul Sartre sorts of women?”

— Richard Yates