Richard Ford Quotes

Only sometimes you can't feel anything about a subject without hypothesizing its extinction.

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

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.

You can get carried away with how things were once, and not how you need to make them better.

All we really want is to get to the point where the past can explain nothing about us and we can get on with life.

Nothing in the world is as hopeful as knowing a woman you like is somewhere thinking about only you. Conversely, there is no badness anywhere as acute as the badness of no woman out in the world thinking about you. Or worse. That one has quit because of some bone-headedness on your part. It is like looking out an airplane window and finding the earth has disappeared. No loneliness can compete with that.

And what there is to learn from almost any human experience is that your own interests usually do not come first where other people are concerned — even the people who love you — and that is all right. It can be lived with.

Some idiotic things are well worth doing.

She looked at me and the expression on her face was an expression of dislike, one I hadn't seen before but knew right away. Later I would see it turned toward other people. But the first time was looking at me and was because she believed she'd done all she could that was correct and the best thing, and it had only gotten her stuck with me. And I couldn't do anything that mattered. Though if I could I would've had my father be there, or Warren Miller, or somebody who had the right words that would take the place of hers, anybody she could speak to without just hearing her own voice in a room and having to go about the trouble of pretending she did not feel absolutely alone.

...good counsel: generosity, longevity, acceptance, relinquishment, letting the world come to me — and, with these things to make a life.

Cynicism makes you feel smart, I know it, even when you aren't smart.

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

It's shocking to note how close we play to unwelcome realizations, and yet how our ongoing ignorance makes so much of life possible.

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.

The most important things of your life can change so suddenly, so unrecoverably, that you can forget even the most important of them and their connections, you are so taken up by the chanciness of all's that happened and by all that could and will happen next.