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James Richardson Quotes
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James Richardson is an American poet.

✵ 1. January 1950
James Richardson: 89   quotes 6   likes

James Richardson Quotes

“I’m sitting here bored, … trying to remember that everything is a complete mystery.”

James Richardson

#489
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“Envy is ashamed of itself. If it weren’t hanging back, it would go all the way to emulation and love.”

James Richardson

#355
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

Love , Way , Envy

“To condemn your sin in another is hypocrisy. Not to condemn is to reserve your right to sin.”

James Richardson

#196
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“The first quest or the first love is also the last. The second isn’t.”

James Richardson

#427
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

Love

“I aspire to know when best to walk or eat, which music I need, and how to keep myself sitting as I am now, stubbornly enraptured with doing practically nothing.”

James Richardson

#165
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

Music

“Happiness, like water, is always available, but so often it seems we’d prefer a different drink.”

James Richardson

Aphorism #2
Interglacial (2004)

Drink , Water , Happiness

“Path: where nothing grows.”

James Richardson

Aphorism #19
Interglacial (2004)

“I’m surprised that multiple personalities are so much less common in reality than in fiction: what a little disorder it would take, a distraction, a sleep, for one of our minor characters to imagine he was the star, to speak out for everyone else. And that’s what it would be, a change of billing, not of authorship. For you do not write your play—you are just the character in it called The Playwright. The real writer, you never meet.”

James Richardson

#139
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

Imagination , Star , Reality , Sleep

“I worked so hard to understand it that it must be true.”

James Richardson

Aphorism #131
Interglacial (2004)

Understanding

“Patience is not very different from courage. It just takes longer.”

James Richardson

#54
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

Courage , Patience

“Judging itself brings the pain of being judged. The wicked judge mistakes this for another crime of the accused and lengthens his sentence.”

James Richardson

#441
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

Pain

“It is clear, we say, as if to see through something were to know it.”

James Richardson

#181
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“What I’m not changes more than what I am.”

James Richardson

#91
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

Change

“Why would we write if we’d already heard what we wanted to hear?”

James Richardson

#25
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“Reason is the lesser faith that steers us when we have already lost a greater one.”

James Richardson

#57
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

Faith

“The best way to know your faults is to notice which ones you accuse others of.”

James Richardson

#195
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

Way

“There is no road to the land without roads.”

James Richardson

Aphorism #99
Interglacial (2004)

“A strange gratitude for those I disagree with. They keep me from having to take too seriously the moments when I disagree with myself.”

James Richardson

#185
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

Gratitude

“Birds of prey don’t sing.”

James Richardson

Aphorism #7
Interglacial (2004)

Bird , Singing