Quotes by Richard Ford

“Construed as turf, home just seems a provisional claim, a designation you make upon a place, not one it makes on you. A certain set of buildings, a glimpsed, smudged window-view across a schoolyard, a musty aroma sniffed behind a garage when you were a child, all of which come crowding in upon your latter-day senses / those are pungent things and vivid, even consoling. But to me they are also inert and nostalgic and unlikely to connect you to the real, to that essence art can sometimes achieve, which is permanence.”

“Fear and hope are alike underneath”

“Married life requires shared mystery even when all the facts are known.”

“Theres a lot to be said for doing what youre not supposed to do, and the rewards of doing what youre supposed to do are more subtle and take longer to become apparent, which maybe makes it less attractive. But your life is the blueprint you make after the building is built.”

“Writing is the only thing Ive ever done with persistence, except for being married.”

“Its interesting to leave a place, interesting even to think about it. Leaving reminds us of what we can part with and what we cant, then offers us something new to look forward to, to dream about.”

“The river gives and the river basically takes away. There really isnt a vocabulary that I have access to that describes this. And as always, its the least able to recover from this disaster who will suffer most intensely.”

“Something will be there when the flood recedes. We know that. It will be those people now standing in the water, and on those rooftops - many black, many poor. Homeless. Overlooked. And it will be New Orleans - though its memory may be shortened, its self-gaze and eccentricity scoured out so that whats left is a city more like other cities, less insular, less self-regarding, but possibly more self-knowing after today. A city on firmer ground.”

“Its not surprising,”

“Its not surprising. A lot of blacks didnt get to go to school. They were kept from being educated. It hasnt been a question of talent, its been a question of opportunity.”

The kind of happy I was that day at the Vet when Hawk Dawson actually doffed his red C cap to me, and everyone cheered and practically convulsed into tears - you cant patent that. It was one shining moment of glory that was instantly gone. Whereas life, real life, is different and cant even be appraised as simply happy, but only in terms of Yes, Ill take it all, thanks or No, I believe I wont. Happy, as my poor father used to say, is a lot of hooey. Happy is a circus clown, a sitcom, a greeting card. Life, though, lifes about something sterner. But also something better. A lot better. Believe me.

If you lose all hope, you can always find it again.

The question ‘Why poetry?’ isn’t asking what makes poetry unique among art forms; poetry may indeed share its origins with other forms of privileged utterance. A somewhat more interesting question would be: “What is the nature of experience, and especially the experience of using language, that calls poetic utterance into existence? What is there about experience that’s unutterable?” You can’t generalize very usefully about poetry; you can’t reduce its nature down to a kernel that underlies all its various incarnations. I guess my internal conversation suggests that if you can’t successfully answer the question of “Why poetry?,” can’t reduce it in the way I think you can’t, then maybe that’s the strongest evidence that poetry’s doing its job; it’s creating an essential need and then satisfying it.

It is no loss to mankind when one writer decides to call it a day. When a tree falls in the forest, who cares but the monkeys?

And I think that in myself (and perhaps evident in what I write) fear of loss and the corresponding instinct to protect myself against loss are potent forces.

I had written all I was going to write, if the truth had been known, and there is nothing wrong with that. If more writers knew that, the world would be saved a lot of bad books, and more people--men and women alike--could go on to happier, more productive lives.

Real mystery - the very reason to read (and certainly write) any book - was to them a thing to dismantle, distill and mine out into rubble they could tyrannize into sorry but more permanent explanations; monuments to themselves, in other words. In my view all teachers should be required to stop teaching at age thirty-two and not allowed to resume until theyre sixty-five, so that they can live their lives, not teach them away - live lives full of ambiguity and transience and regret and wonder, be asked to explain nothing in public until very near the end when they cant do anything else. Explaining is where we all get into trouble.

Whats friendships realest measure?Ill tell you. The amount of precious time youll squander on someone elses calamities and fuck-ups.

People surprise you, Frank, with just how fuckin stupid they are.

I know you can dream your way through an otherwise fine life, and never wake up, which is what I almost did.