It's been my habit of mind, over these years, to understand that every situation in which human beings are involved can be turned on its head. Everyt… - Richard Ford

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

And now, while he didn't particularly think any of these stories was a bit truer, he did realize that he didn't really know his wife at all; and that in fact the entire conception of knowing another person — of trust, of closeness, of marriage itself — while not exactly a lie since it existed someplace if only as an idea (in his parents' life, at least marginally) was still completely out-of-date, defunct, was something typifying another era, now unfortunately gone. Meeting a girl, falling in love, marrying her, moving to Connecticut, buying a fucking house, starting a life with her and thinking you really knew anything about her — the last part was a complete fiction, which made all the rest a joke.

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.

My parents...were people running from the past, who didn't look back at much if they could help it, and whose whole life always lay somewhere in the offing.