James Richardson Quotes

Only the dead have discovered what they cannot live without.

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.

There is no road to the land without roads.

Patience is decisive indecision.

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

Easier to keep changing your life than to live it.

Your choices: spend, and believe in things; save, and believe in money.

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

It is clear, we say, as if to see through something were to know it.

To think yourself incapable of crime is one failure of the imagination. To think yourself capable of all crimes is another.

The new gets old much faster than the old gets older.

The tyrant puts down his own rebellion, everywhere.

To me the great divide is between the talkative and the quiet. Do they just say everything that’s on their minds, even before it’s on their minds? Sometimes I think I could just turn up my head like a walkman so what’s going on there could be heard by others. But there would still be a difference. For inside the head they are talking to people like them, and I am talking to someone like me: he is quiet and doesn’t much like being talked at; he can’t conceal how easily he gets bored.

There are crimes I don’t commit mainly because I don’t want to find out I could.

Value yourself according to the burdens you carry, and you will find everything a burden.