Richard Yates Quotes

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

..."a man doesn't spend all these years building something and then kick it to pieces. Don't - well, to put it coarsely, don't shit where you eat."

she talked less, or at least did less of the kind of talking whose only purpose was to fill silence

"There's something we have to discuss," she said, and from the way she said it he knew it wouldn't be a discussion at all. She had something to tell him - something he wouldn't like - and he had better shut up and sit down and listen.

To find order in chaos - why, of course; that was what he'd wanted all his life. He had been born for this, for finding order in chaos, and all the wasted years has been a mistake. To find order in chaos; to find order in chaos.

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.

"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.

After a second or two he thrust the muzzle forward and broke out the pane of glass, less because he knew it would make for a better aim than because it was what gunmen always did behind windows in movies.

Sumbitch wasn't even needed, that's the funny part; just some eager-beaver bastard couldn't mind his own business.

He seemed decent and kindly enough, but Prentice was cautioned by an old and trusted rule of his schooldays: Beware of the first friendly one; he's probably an outcast himself.

Her face, in the spattered mirror, was a shocked and wild-eyed ruin.

That had the sound of a good exit line, so she went quickly into her room and slammed the door.

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

The question of whether or not she would find it awkward being called "Mrs Nelson" remained unresolved; nobody in Scarsdale called her anything at all. Electric trains drew the men away to the city each morning and the children were swallowed up by the school. The women, alone in their big, impeccable houses, let their days slip away in endless rounds of triviality - or at least, that was the way Alice saw them in her mind's eye. She pictured them idling through easy household chores or giving instructions to their maids, and painting their fingernails and fixing their hair and compounding their lassitude by spending hours on the telephone with one another, talking of bridge clubs and luncheons and functions of the P.T.A. If their lives included anything more interesting than that she didn't learn of it, for none of them ever called her up or dropped in for a neighbourly visit - nor, apparently, did any of their husbands ever strike up an acquaintance with Sterling on the train. Scarsdale behaved as though Alice and Sterling didn't exist.

I expect you'll miss your friends. I don't really have any friends; not real ones. Anyway, we'll make new friends.