Richard Yates Quotes

It's often occurred to me, she said, that 'friend' is about the most treacherous word in the language.

And from this distance they all did look like kids - boys and girls from far and wide with their cheap hand luggage and their Army duffel bags, brave entertainers who might travel for years before it occurred to them, or to most of them, that they weren't going anywhere.

I think you'll find ordinary people are nicer than you give them credit for being

Well, marriage is funny, Mike, Harold said once with the wind whipping the vapor of his voice over his shoulder. You can go along for years without ever knowing who you're married to. It's a riddle. You're right, Michael said. It is. Then maybe once in a while you take a look at this girl, this woman, and you think: What's the deal? How come? Why her? Why me? Yeah, I know what you mean, Harold.

Of course. And isn't that the worst kind of loss? When you don't even realise the value of something until you've thrown it away?

Try to remember this, men. The mark of a professional in any line of work - I mean any line of work - is that he can make difficult things look easy.

We had a few beers and laughed more than we meant to and punched each other's arms; in the end, out on the sidewalk again, I think we shook hands about three times in saying goodbye. Just before turning away he said "Listen, though: don't look back too much, okay? You can drive yourself crazy that way."

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.

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.

Could a person really be cynical about everything in the world and still expect to have friends?

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."

Most people do the best they can.

and for an hour or two they talked in circles.

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

You don't have much use for black people, do you, Mr Wilder? Deep down you wish we'd all go away. You think our lips are too thick and our noses too flat and you shudder at the thought of our kinky hair. Isn't that about right, Mr Wilder?