250 Quotes by Richard Ford

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

What I know is, you have chance in life--of surviving it--if you tolerate loss well; manage not to be a cynic through it all; to subordinate, as Ruskin implied, to keep proportion, to connect the unequal things into a whole that preserves the good, even if admittedly good is often not simple to find.

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

She was an artist. She held opposites in her mind.

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

I realized I loved you, and I didn't want to be married to somebody I didn't love. I wanted to be married to you. It isn't all that complicated.

Something will be there when the flood recedes. We know that. It will be those people now standing in the water, and on those rooftops - many black, many poor. Homeless. Overlooked. And it will be New Orleans - though its memory may be shortened, its self-gaze and eccentricity scoured out so that what's left is a city more like other cities, less insular, less self-regarding, but possibly more self-knowing after today. A city on firmer ground.

Most things don't stay the way they are for very long. I take nothing for granted and try to be ready for the change that's soon to come.

When people realize they are being listened to, they tell you things.