Richard Ford Quotes

“Some idiotic things are well worth doing.”

“I'm a verb, Frank. Verbs don't answer questions.”

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

“Things you did. Things you never did. Things you dreamed. After a long time they run together.”

“Don't let what your parents do disappoint you.”

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

“What was our life like? I almost don't remember now. Though I remember, the space of time it occupied. And I remember it fondly.”

“When you are sixteen you do not know what your parents know, or much of what they understand, and less of what's in their hearts. This can save you from becoming an adult too early, save your life from becoming only theirs lived over again - which is a loss. But to shield yourself - as I didn't do - seems to be an even greater error, since what's lost is the truth of your parents' life and what you should think about it, and beyond that, how you should estimate the world you are about to live in.”

“"I'm not worried," I said. And I wasn't, because I thought things would be fine. And even though I was wrong, it is still not so bad a way to set your mind toward the unknown just when you are coming into the face of it.”

“And though they may both have felt that something had died between them, something they may not even have been aware or until it was gone and disappeared from their lives forever, they must've felt - both of them - that there was something of themselves, something important, that could not live at all in any other way but by their being together, much as they had been before.”

“You're only good if you can do bad and decide not to.”

“Our ex-wifes always harbour secrets about us that make them irresistable. Until, of course, we remember who we are and what we did and why we are not married anymore.”

“Tweet, tweet, you're alive, you ignorant asshole.”

“Humans generally get out the gist of what they need to say right at the beginning, then spend forever qualifying, contradicting, burnishing or taking important things back. Yor rareley miss anything by cutting most people off after two sentences.”

“An infinite remoteness underlies us all.”

“It's probably nice to know your parents were once not your parents.”

“In the fall of 1960, when I was sixteen and my father was for a time not working, my mother met a man named Warren Miller and fell in love with him.”

“You can get carried away with how things were once, and not how you need to make them better.”

“I may be too cynical," Catherine says.
If you're worried about it, you probably aren't.”

“This is how you knew what a fool was—someone who didn't know what mattered to him in the long run”

“One day you think you never even made a choice and then you have to make one, even a wrong one, just so you're sure you're still able. And once that's over, you can go back and be happy again with what you were before you started worrying.”

“Sometimes we do not really become adults until we suffer a good whacking loss, and our lives in a sense catch up with us and wash over us like a wave and everything goes.”

“Her complexion seemed slowly to be losing its olive color, and the set of her mouth hardened as though interior shifts were taking place she herself didn't know about but which had already corrected her outlook toward the rest of the world.”

“But when you are older, nothing you did when you were young matters at all. I know that now, though I didn't know it then. We were simply young.”