Richard Yates Quotes

"I see," she said. And when would she ever learn to stop saying 'I see' about things she didn't see at all?

there is an automatic pleasure in watching a thing done well.

Sometimes the world was just too fucking much.

As [Richard Yates] explained in a 1972 interview, his characters "all rush around trying to do their best—trying to live well, within their known or unknown limitations, doing what they can't help doing, ultimately and inevitably failing because they can't help being the people they are. That's what brings on the calamity at the end." Yates's compassion for human weakness, for the flaws that make failure so inevitable, is everywhere in his work [...]. Yates also tended to be hard on characters based on himself. But all are worthy of our sympathy in at least one respect: They try to do their best but fail because of limitations over which they have no control.

and for an hour or two they talked in circles.

The aesthetic perfectionist, who spent hours slaving over a sentence

It seemed only a few minutes later that he woke with a sense that the world was coming apart.

There would probably always be kids like Grove in prep schools: you would find only irritation in trying to help them, or to like them, and you could probably never bring yourself to call them by their first names until ten years later, when they came back to visit the school with their wives.

There was no readiness for soldiering in this truck, no stern and cocky welcoming of challenges. They sounded - oh, Mother of God - they sounded like children.

The first drink tasted so good that he let her do most of the talking while he savored it, sitting beside her and watching her profile. The tip of her small nose bobbed very slightly up and down at each syllable beginning with p, b or m, and that seemed a lovely thing for a girl's nose to do.

Well, I think Phil's got a fairly good chance of getting in there, maybe even on a scholarship. It sounds fine; still, all I know about Harvard is the reputation, you know - the outside view. And that's sort of like the Empire State Building, right? You see it from a distance, maybe at sunset, and it's this majestic, beautiful thing. Then you get inside, you walk around a couple of the lower floors, and it turns out to be one of the sleaziest office buildings in New York: there's nothing in there but small-time insurance agencies and costume-jewellery wholesalers. There isn't any reason for the tallest building in the world. So you ride all the way up to the top and your eardrums hurt and you're out there at the parapet looking out, looking down, and even that's a disappointment because you've seen it all in photographs so many times. Right? So I don't know; I think Phil and I'd better go up to Harvard for a couple of days and kind of snoop around.

Because you see there are millions and millions of people in New York - more people than you can possibly imagine, ever - and most of them are doing something that makes sound. Maybe talking, or playing the radio, maybe closing doors, maybe putting their forks down on their plates if they're having dinner, or dropping their shoes if they're going to bed - and because there are so many of them, all those little sounds add up and come together in a kind of hum. But it's so faint - so very, very faint - that you can't hear it unless you listen very carefully for a long time.

"Okay, kid," Walker said, "This is it." And it was the absurdity of the phrase - nobody said "This is it" except in the movies, unless they were phoney bastards like Loomis - that roused Prentice to his first real anger of the morning. He wanted to smash and break the head of anyone stupid enough to say a thing like that; he wanted to kill all the posturing fraudulence in the world, and it was all here before him in this big, dumb, bobbing face.

(and when would she ever learn not to monopolize a whole evening's conversation?)

He couldn't help pondering how he would feel if his own father were to die. It was unthinkable: Jock MacKenzie was in the very prime of life, a laughing, sailing, golf- and tennis-playing man who could still defeat his son at arm-wrestling any time he felt like it, and often did. Still, there were heart attacks; there were strokes; there was cancer. Nobody lived forever. Jock MacKenzie's anger could be terrible, but in his gentle moods there was no finer companion in the world. Every worthwhile thing Steve knew, it seemed, was something he had learned from his father. As a condition of receiving a car on his sixteenth birthday, Steve had been made to memorise the whole of Kipling's "If", which later helped him earn the only "A" he'd ever had in Pop Driscoll's course; and certain lines of that poem, remembered now as they sounded in his father's voice , were enough to fill his eyes with tears.
This Sunday, he promised himself, he would call home and have a good long talk with the old man. "When you're talking, Steve", Jock MacKenzie had told him once, "and I don't care who it's to or what it's about, the important thing is knowing when to stop. Never say anything that doesn't improve on silence."