Richard Ford Quotes

I knew you could know the words but not match them with the life. But to be able to do it right said something about you. And I didn’t know if my judgment was good enough, or exactly what was good or bad. Though there must be times, I thought, when there was no right thing to know, just as there were times when there was no right thing to do.

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'm a verb, Frank. Verbs don't answer questions.

No words came out of me. Words can also be the feeblest emissaries for our feelings.

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

He was becoming who and what he was always supposed to be. He’d simply had to wear down through the other layers to who he really was. I’ve seen this phenomenon in the faces of other men — homeless men, men sprawled on the pavement in front of bars or in public parks or bus depots, or lined up outside the doors of missions, waiting to get in out of a long winter. In their faces — plenty of them were handsome, but ruined — I’ve seen the remnants of who they almost succeeded in being but failed to be, before becoming themselves.

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.

It was striking, the character of destruction. It was always diverse

Very early you come to the realization that nothing will ever take you away from yourself.

Athletes, by and large, are people who are happy to let their actions speak for them, happy to be what they do. As a result, when you talk to an athlete, as I do all the time in locker rooms, in hotel coffee shops and hallways, standing beside expensive automobiles — even if he’s paying no attention to you at all, which is very often the case — he’s never likely to feel the least bit divided, or alienated, or one ounce of existential dread. He may be thinking about a case of beer, or a barbecue, or some man-made lake in Oklahoma he wishes he was waterskiing on, or some girl or a new Chevy shortbed, or a discothèque he owns as a tax shelter, or just simply himself. But you can bet he isn’t worried one bit about you and what you’re thinking. His is a rare selfishness that means he isn’t looking around the sides of his emotions to wonder about alternatives for what he’s saying or thinking about. In fact, athletes at the height of their powers make literalness into a mystery all its own simply by becoming absorbed in what they’re doing. Years of athletic training teach this; the necessity of relinquishing doubt and ambiguity and self-inquiry in favor of a pleasant, self-championing one-dimensionality which has instant rewards in sports. You can even ruin everything with athletes simply by speaking to them in your own everyday voice, a voice possibly full of contingency and speculation. It will scare them to death by demonstrating that the world — where they often don’t do too well and sometimes fall into depressions and financial imbroglios and worse once their careers are over — is complexer than what their training has prepared them for. As a result, they much prefer their own voices and questions or the jabber of their teammates (even if it’s in Spanish). And if you are a sportswriter you have to tailor yourself to their voices and answers: “How are you going to beat this team, Stu?” Truth, of course, can still be the result — “We’re just going out and play our kind

Dreaminess is, among other things, a state of suspended recognition, and a response to too much useless and complicated factuality. Its symptoms can be a long-term interest in the weather, or a sustained soaring feeling, or a bout of the stares that you sometimes can not even know about except in retrospect, when the time may seem fogged.

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.

It’s odd how a piece of ground can hold so little of its meaning; though that’s lucky, since for it to do so would make places sacred but impenetrable, whereas they’re otherwise neither.

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

Our sympathies are most required when they seem least due.