Richard Yates citations

“Never say anything that doesn't improve on silence.”

“People did change, and a change could be a bloom as well as a withering…”

“if you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone.”

“It's a disease. Nobody thinks or feels or cares any more; nobody gets excited or believes in anything except their own comfortable little God damn mediocrity.”

“No one forgets the truth; they just get better at lying.”

“if you don’t try at anything, you can’t fail… it takes back bone to lead the life you want”

“I'm only interested in stories that are about the crushing of the human heart.”

“Are artists and writers the only people entitled to lives of their own?”

“You're painfully alive in a drugged and dying culture.”

“Do you know what the definition of insane is? Yes. It’s the inability to relate to another human being. It’s the inability to love.”

“He couldn't even tell whether he was angry or contrite, whether it was forgiveness he wanted or the power to forgive.”

“If my work has a theme, I suspect it is a simple one: that most human beings are inescapably alone, and therein lies their tragedy.”

“And do you know a funny thing? I'm almost fifty years old and I've never understood anything in my whole life.”

“She just happened to feel like it. Wasn’t that after all, the only reason there was? Had she ever had a less selfish, more complicated reason for doing anything in her life?”

“He had won but he didn't feel like a winner.”

“Why did everything always change when all you wanted, all you had ever humbly asked of whatever God there might be, was that certain things be allowed to stay the same?”

“Our ability to measure and apportion time affords an almost endless source of comfort.”

“God knows there certainly ought to be a window around here somewhere, for all of us.”

“Know what we did, Lucy? You and me? We spent our whole lives yearning. Isn't that the God damndest thing?”

“Dying for love might be pitiable, but it wasn't much different, finally, from any other kind of dying.”

“Hopeless emptiness. Now you've said it. Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.”

“In avoiding specific goals he had avoided specific limitations. For the time being the world, life itself, could be his chosen field.”

“There was no readiness for soldiering in this truck, no stern and cocky welcoming of challenges. They sounded - oh, Mother of God - they sounded like children.”