Quotes by Richard Russo

“If you say you dont have any incentives, the phone gets hung up and you dont have a chance to pitch Maine. You have to be in the ballpark.”

“I loved the idea of having Paul Newman here, and that wonderful cast. I was particularly glad to see . . . that army of people, many of them local, who were set into motion by that film.”

It was a scary thought. A man could be surrounded by poetry reading and not know it.

I dont tell you this story today in order to encourage all of you in the class of 04 to find careers in the music business, but rather to suggest what the next decade of your lives is likely to be about, and that is, trying to ensure that you dont wake up at 32 or 35 or 40 tenured to a life that happened to you when you werent paying strict attention, either because the money was good, or it made your parents proud, or because you were unlucky enough to discover an aptitude for the very thing that bores you to tears, or for any of the other semi-valid reasons people marshal to justify allowing the true passion of their lives to leak away. If youre lucky, you may have more than one chance to get things right, but second and third chances, like second and third marriages, can be dicey propositions, and they dont come with guarantees.... The question then is this: How does a person keep from living the wrong life?

Maybe sheetrocking wasnt one of Sullys favorite jobs, but like most physical labor, there was a rhythm to it that you could find if you cared to look, and once you found this rhythm itd get you through a morning. Rhythm was what Sully had counted on over the long years - that and the wisdom to understand that no job, no matter how thankless or stupid or backbreaking, could not be gotten through. The clock moved if you let it.

What if all everybody needed in the world was to be sure of one friend? What if you were the one, and you refused to say those simple words?

...he had to comfort himself with the firm conviction that most of what he objected to in Mohawk and the world at large was not the result of people reading the wrong books, but rather of not reading any at all.

Nor do I want the woman that I’m married to and that I love to leave me, but the thought of her doing so moves me in a way that our growing old together and contentedly slipping, in affectionate tandem, toward the grave does not.

Max would conclude, thats who I want to be. The pope. And Ill do the same thing he does. Ill keep all the goddamn money.

Since her retirement from teaching Miss Beryls health had in many respects greatly improved, despite her advancing years. An eighth-grade classroom was an excellent place to snag whatever was in the air in the way of illness. Also depression, which, Miss Beryl believed, in conjunction with guilt, opened the door to illness. Miss Beryl didnt know any teachers who werent habitually guilty and depressed--guilty they hadnt accomplished more with their students, depressed that very little more was possible.

He’d meant to forgive his brother, maybe even imagined he had. He’d also meant to learn to trust him, but instead merely fell into the habit of waiting for him to fuck up again.

What I discovered I liked best about striking out on my bicycle was that the farther I got from home, the more interesting and unusual my thoughts became.

An imperfect human heart, perfectly shattered, was her conclusion. A condition so common as to be virtually universal, rendering issues of right and wrong almost incidental.

It’s not an easy time for any parent, this moment when the realization dawns that you’ve given birth to something that will never see things the way you do, despite the fact that it is your living legacy, that it bears your name.

Everybody looked at Sully suspiciously. A rumor that he had burned up in the blaze had been circulating, and people had quickly adjusted to the idea of profound human tragedy. They were reluctant to give it up, Sully could tell. He smiled apologetically at the crowd.

- You get more misanthropic every day.- I get older every day. My experience of human nature gets wider and deeper.

To weigh and evaluate a vast grid of information, much of it meaningless, and to arrive at sensible, if erroneous, conclusions, is a skill not to be sneezed at.

Interesting, Miles thought. Like himself, Father Mark, as a child, had been reassured by the imagined proximity of God, whereas adults, perhaps because they so often were up to no good, took more comfort from His remoteness.

Stories worked much the same way…A false note at the beginning was much more costly than one nearer the end because early errors were part of the foundation.

No, Sullyd decided long ago to abstain from all but the most general forms of regret. He allowed himself the vague wish that things had turned out differently, without blaming himself that they hadnt, any more than hed blamed himself when his 1-2-3 triple never ran like it should at least once. It didnt pay to second-guess every one of lifes decisions, to pretend to wisdom about the past from the safety of the present, the way so many people did when they got older. As if, given a second chance to live their lives, theyd be smarter. Sully didnt know too many people who got noticeably smarter over the course of a lifetime. Some made fewer mistakes, but in Sullys opinion that was because they couldnt go quite so fast. They had less energy, no more virtue; fewer opportunities to screw up, not more wisdom. It was Sullys policy to stick by his mistakes....