James Richardson Quotes

The cynic suffers the form of faith without love. Incredulity is his piety.

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.

The great consolation of righteousness is never having to worry whether you’re a bore.

Why would we write if we’d already heard what we wanted to hear?

First he gathered what he needed. Then he needed to keep gathering what he used to need.

The viruses that co-opt the machinery of our cells; the stories we allow to enter and explain us.

Happiness is the readiness to be happy.

Bitterness is a greater failure than failure.

Beware of knowing your virtues; you may lose them. Beware of knowing your vices; you may forgive them.

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.

The drives were nature’s first provision: thinking was added later, to get us around the world’s obstacles to them.

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.

Envy is ashamed of itself. If it weren’t hanging back, it would go all the way to emulation and love.

The first abuse of power is not realizing that you have it.

Any virtue systematically applied becomes a vice. Morality is attention, not system.