Richard Ford Quotes

...to encounter me now at age sixty-six is to be unable to imagine me at fifteen...

And I think that in myself (and perhaps evident in what I write) fear of loss
and the corresponding instinct to protect myself against loss are potent forces.

It's probably nice to know your parents were once not your parents.

If you lose all hope, you can always find it again.

the worst thing about regret is that it makes you duck the chance of new regret, just as you get a glimmer that nothing is worth doing unless it has the potential to fuck up your whole life.

(My greatest human flaw and strength, not surprisingly, is that I can always imagine anything — a marriage, a conversation, a government — as being different from how it is, a trait that might make one a top-notch trial lawyer or novelist or realtor, but that also seems to produce a somewhat less than reliable and morally feasible human being.)

How amazingly far normalcy extends; how you can keep it in sight as if you were on a raft sliding out to sea, the stitch of land growing smaller and smaller. Or in a balloon swept up on a column of prairie air, the ground widening and flattening, growing less and less distinct below you. You notice it, or you don't notice it. But you're already too far away and all is lost.

It's been my habit of mind, over these years, to understand that every situation in which human beings are involved can be turned on its head. Everything someone assures me to be true might not be. Every pillar of belief the world rests on may or may not be about to explode. Most things don't stay the way they are very long. Knowing this, however, has not made me cynical. Cynical means believing that good isn't possible; and I know for a fact that good is. I simply take nothing for granted and try to be ready for the change that's soon to come.

Life's passed along to us empty. We have to make up the happiness part.

At the exact moment any decision seems to be being made, it's usually long after the real decision was actually made — like light we see emitted from stars.

For now let me say only this: if sportswriting teaches you anything, and there is much truth to it as well as plenty of lies, it is that for your life to be worth anything you must sooner or later face the possibility of terrible, searing regret. Though you must also manage to avoid it or your life will be ruined.

Someone ... tell us what's important, because we no longer know.

I didn't know with certainty what to say about the large world, and didn't care to risk speculating. And I still don't. That we all look at it from someplace, and in some hopeful-useful way, is about all I found I could say — my best, most honest effort. And that isn't enough for literature, though it didn't bother me much. Nowadays, I'm willing to say yes to as much as I can: yes to my town, my neighborhood, my neighbor, yes to his car, her lawn and hedge and rain gutters. Let things be the best they can be. Give us all a good night's sleep until it's over.

Teachers, let me tell you, are born deceivers of the lowest sort, since what they want from life is impossible — time-freed, existential youth forever. It commits them to terrible deceptions and departures from the truth. And literature, being lasting, is their ticket.

He was like my father. They each wanted me to be their audience, to hear the things they needed to express.