Richard Ford citations

“Some idiotic things are well worth doing.”

“People surprise you, Frank, with just how fuckin stupid they are. I mean, do you actually realize how much adult conversation is spent on this fuckin business? Facts treated like they were opinions just for the simple purpose of talking about it longer? Some people might think that's interesting, bub, but I'll tell you. It's romanticizing a goddamn rock by calling it a mountain range to me. People waste a helluva lot of time they could be putting to useful purposes. This is a game. See it and forget about it.”

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

“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.”

“Find what causes a commotion in your heart. Find a way to write about that”

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

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

“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.”

“Life's passed along to us empty. We have to make up the happiness part.”

“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.”

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

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

“An infinite remoteness underlies us all.”

“"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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”