Richard Ford Quotes

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.

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

Your life doesn't mean what you have or what you get. It's what you're willing to give up.

What's friendship's realest measure?
I'll tell you. The amount of precious time you'll squander on someone else's calamities and fuck-ups.

Our sympathies are most required when they seem least due.

I don’t, after all, know what’s wrong with him, am not even certain anything is, or that wrong isn’t just a metaphor for something else, which may itself already be a metaphor. Though probably what’s amiss, if anything, is not much different from what’s indistinctly amiss with all of us at one time or another – we’re not happy, we don’t know why, and we drive ourselves loony trying to get better

Things happen when people are not where they belong, and the world moves forward and back by that principle.

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.

It's odd how our fears, the ones we didn't know we had, alter our sight line and make us see things that never were.

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.