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James Richardson Quotes
page 2

James Richardson is an American poet.

✵ 1. January 1950
James Richardson: 89 quotes6 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)

“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)

“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)

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

James Richardson

Aphorism #2
Interglacial (2004)

“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)

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

James Richardson

Aphorism #131
Interglacial (2004)

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

James Richardson

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

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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)

“Birds of prey don’t sing.”

James Richardson

Aphorism #7
Interglacial (2004)