Richard Ford Quotes

Just exactly what that good life was — the one I expected — I cannot tell you now exactly, though I wouldn't say it has not come to pass, only that much has come in between.

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

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

My parents...were people running from the past, who didn't look back at much if they could help it, and whose whole life always lay somewhere in the offing.

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

What I know is, you have a better chance in life-of surviving it-if you tolerate loss well;manage not to be a cynic through it all;...
to connect the unequal things into a whole that preserves the good,even if the good is not simple to find. We try, as my sister said. We try.

You can't write ... on the strength of influence. You can only write a good story or a good novel by yourself.

Some people want to be bank presidents. Other people want to rob banks.

I'm intrigued by how ordinary behavior exists so close beside its opposite.

It was on such a night as this that the unhappy things came about.

... that life can't be escaped and must be faced entirely.

And though they may both have felt that something had died between them, something they may not even have been aware or until it was gone and disappeared from their lives forever, they must've felt - both of them - that there was something of themselves, something important, that could not live at all in any other way but by their being together, much as they had been before.

It is no loss to mankind when one writer decides to call it a day. When a
tree falls in the forest, who cares but the monkeys?

Sometimes we do not really become adults until we suffer a good whacking loss, and our lives in a sense catch up with us and wash over us like a wave and everything goes.

Most things don't stay the way they are very long.