James Richardson

A day is only a day. But a life is only a life.

Birds of prey don’t sing.

What did you do today? Nothing say our little children, and so do I. What we most are is what we keep mistaking for nothing.

I’ve spent so long trying to fly that it’s too late to set out on foot.

I’m surprised that multiple personalities are so much less common in reality than in fiction: what a little disorder it would take, a distraction, a sleep, for one of our minor characters to imagine he was the star, to speak out for everyone else. And that’s what it would be, a change of billing, not of authorship. For you do not write your play—you are just the character in it called The Playwright. The real writer, you never meet.

Books serve us simply by opening a window on all we wanted to say and feel and think about. We may not even notice that they have not said it themselves till we go back to them years later and do not find what we loved in them. You cannot keep the view by taking the window with you.

Greater than the temptations of beauty are those of method.

The man who sticks to his plan will become what he used to want to be.

Water deepens where it has to wait.

What I’m not changes more than what I am.

Hasn’t there … been a little too much zeal in our reproof of children and friends for yielding to the temptations we ourselves find it most difficult to resist? We punish where we can least afford to sympathize. Of all the horrors of the daily news, it seems hardest to imagine the kind of cruelty that is intensified by the pain of its victims, but whenever we feel sympathy would weaken us, we are a little closer to the torturer.

I lied. And my embarrassment was so great that I changed everything else to make the lie true.

The procrastinator dreads beginning, the workaholic, ending.

Think of all the smart people made stupid by flaws of character. The finest watch isn’t fine long when used as a hammer.

I aspire to know when best to walk or eat, which music I need, and how to keep myself sitting as I am now, stubbornly enraptured with doing practically nothing.