Richard Russo
I've never written nearly as much about place as people seem to think I do. I just write about class.
And there comes a time in your life when you realize that if you don't take the opportunity to be happy, you may never get another chance again.Collection: Life
People sometimes get in the habit of being loyal to a mistake.Collection: Mistake
Which is why we have spouses and children and parents and colleagues and friends, because someone has to know us better than we know ourselves. We need them to tell us. We need them to say, "I know you, Al. You are not the kind of man who.Collection: Children
After all, what was the whole wide world but a place for people to yearn for their heart's impossible desires, for those desires to become entrenched in defiance of logic, plausibility, and even the passage of time, as eternal as polished marble.Collection: Heart
Have you ever noticed that when people use the expression 'I have to say', what follows usually needn't be said?Collection: Expression
What if all everybody needed in the world was to be sure of one friend? What if you were the one, and you refused to say those simple words?Collection: Simple
Bookstores, like libraries, are the physical manifestation of the wide world's longest, most thrilling conversation.Collection: Library
When you don't know what to do, try something; if that doesn't work, try something else.Collection: Trying
I was the one who did come through that door. You were the one she was waiting for.Collection: Doors
Go to it. Be bold. Be true. Be kind. Rotate your tires. Don't drink so much. There aren't going to be enough liver transplants to go around.Collection: Graduation
Was anything in the world truer than that intuitive leap of the heart?Collection: Heart
Were it not for Occam's Razor, which always demands simplicity, I'd be tempted to believe that human beings are more influenced by distant causes than immediate ones. This would especially be true of overeducated people, who are capable of thinking past the immediate, of becoming obsessed by the remote. It's the old stuff, the conflicts we've never come to terms with, that sneaks up on us, half forgotten, insisting upon action.Collection: Believe
Whatever you're working on, take small bites. The task will not be overwhelming if you can reduce it to its smallest component.Collection: Tasks
There are a great many sins in this world, none of them original.Collection: World
They stayed, many of them, because staying was easier and less scary than leaving.Collection: Scary
What I discovered I liked best about striking out on my bicycle was that the farther I got from home, the more interesting and unusual my thoughts became.Collection: Travel
You can't possibly judge your ability to control something until you've experienced the extremes of its capabilities. Do you understand?Collection: Judging
I just have this feeling that if it weren't for the Gloversville Free Library that I probably would not be a writer.Collection: Feelings
He'd discovered that his memories of that summer were like bad movie montages - young lovers tossing a Frisbee in the park, sharing a melting ice-cream cone, bicycling along the river, laughing, talking, kissing, a sappy score drowning out the dialogue because the screenwriter had no idea what these two people might say to each other.Collection: Summer
Worse, I have to admit to feeling the jealousy of one crab for another that has managed to climb out of the barrel.Collection: Feelings
That afternoon I came to understand that one of the deepest purposes of intellectual sophistication is to provide distance between us and our most disturbing personal truths and gnawing fears.Collection: Distance
I'll tell you one thing, though. It's a terrible thing to be a disappointment to a good woman.Collection: Disappointment
He looks like he could be taken in a fight. Not by me, but by somebody. Not anyone in Humanities, probably.Collection: Taken
It's possible to overlook character flaws of in-laws for the simple reason that you feel neither responsible for them nor genetically implicated.Collection: Character
My God, he couldn't help thinking, how terrible it is to be that age, to have emotions so near the surface that the slightest turbulence causes them to boil over. That, very simply, was what adulthood must be all about -- acquiring the skill to bury things more deeply. Out of sight and, whenever possible, out of mind.Collection: Thinking
One of the odd things about middle age, he concluded, was the strange decisions a man discovers he's made by not really making them, like allowing friends to drift away through simple neglect.Collection: Simple
To his surprise, she leaned over and kissed him on the forehead, a kiss so full of affection that it dispelled the awkwardness, even as it caused Miles' heart to plummet, because all kisses are calibrated, and this one revealed the great chasm between affection and love.Collection: Heart
"If you paid me for work," continued Max, whose rhetoric was more sophisticated than you might expect from a man with food in his beard, "I wouldn't have to feel worthless. There's not law says old people have to feel worthless all the while, you know. You paid me, I'd have some dignity." Now it was Mile's turn to nod and smile agreeably. "I think the dignity ship set sail a long time ago, Dad."Collection: Dad
In the end it all came down to companionship, to friendship, to sacrifice, to compromise.Collection: Sacrifice
To his surprise he also discovered that it was possible to be good at what you had little interest in, just as it had been possible to be bad at something, whether painting or poetry, that you cared about a great deal.Collection: Littles
To expect reason is where the fallacy lies.Collection: Lying
As I drift back into sleep, I can't help thinking that it's a wonderful thing to be right about the world. To weigh the evidence, always incomplete, and correctly intuit the whole, to see the world in a grain of sand, to recognize its beauty, its simplicity, its truth. It's as close as we get to God in this life, and reside in the glow of such brief flashes of understanding, fully awake, sometimes for two or three seconds, at peace with our existence. And then back to sleep we go.Collection: Sleep
The line of gray along the horizon is brighter now, and with the coming light I feel a certainty: that there is, despite our wild imaginings, only one life. The ghostly others, no matter how real they seem, no matter how badly we need them, are phantoms. The one life we're left with is sufficient to fill and refill our imperfect hearts with joy, and then to shatter them. And it never, ever lets up.Collection: Real
Since her retirement from teaching Miss Beryl's health had in many respects greatly improved, despite her advancing years. An eighth-grade classroom was an excellent place to snag whatever was in the air in the way of illness. Also depression, which, Miss Beryl believed, in conjunction with guilt, opened the door to illness. Miss Beryl didn't know any teachers who weren't habitually guilty and depressed-guilty they hadn't accomplished more with their students, depressed that very little more was possible.Collection: Teacher
People who imagine themselves to be self-made seldom enjoy examining the process of manufacture in detail.Collection: Self
...aware, as always, that the truth isn't much of substitute for a good answer.Collection: Answers
Stories worked much the same way . . . A false note at the beginning was much more costly than one nearer the end because early errors were part of the foundation.Collection: Errors
The world is divided between kids who grow up wanting to be their parents and those like us, who grow up wanting to be anything but. Neither group ever succeeds.Collection: Growing Up
Odd that the future should be so difficult to bring into focus when the past, uninvited, offered itself up so easily for inspection.Collection: Past
I told him the truth, that I loved him and didn't regret anything about our lives together. But do we ever 'tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God' as my father used to say, to those we love? Or even to ourselves? Don't even the best and most fortunate of lives hint at other possibilities, at a different kind of sweetness and, yes, bitterness too? Isn't this why we can't help feeling cheated, even when we know we haven't been?Collection: Regret
I’ve always known that there’s more going on inside me than finds its way into the world, but this is probably true of everyone. Who doesn’t regret that he isn’t more fully understood?Collection: Regret
Sleep is over-rated. Have you ever noticed how it's always recommended to people anybody with half a brain can see need to wake up?Collection: Sleep
One of the nice things about our marriage, at least to my way of thinking, is that my wife and I no longer have to argue every thing through. We each know what the other will say, and so the saying becomes an unnecessary formality. No doubt some marriage counselor would explain to us that our problem is a failure to communicate, but to my way of thinking we've worked long and hard to achieve this silence, Lily's and mine, so fraught with mutual understanding.Collection: Nice
Who but an English professor would threaten to kill a duck a day and hold up a goose as an example?Collection: Ducks
To weigh and evaluate a vast grid of information, much of it meaningless, and to arrive at sensible, if erroneous, conclusions, is a skill not to be sneezed at.Collection: Skills
The other possibility was that there was no right thing to say, that the choice wasn't between right and wrong but between wrong, more wrong, and as wrong as you can get.Collection: Choices
... Baggott enjoys living on the knife edge between hilarity and heartbreak and that makes her a writer after my own heart.Collection: Heart
Don't even the best and most fortunate of lives hint at other possibilities, at a different kind of sweetness and, yes, bitterness too? Isn't this why we can't help feeling cheated, even when we know we haven't been?Collection: Feelings