250 Quotes by Richard Ford

Though when I turn to regard life – my own or others’ – I now never fail to be struck, amid the onslaught of all that’s happened and still is happening, by how much that’s gone from me. Absences seem to surround and intrude upon everything. Though in acknowledging this, I cannot let it be a loss or even be a fact I regret, since that is merely how life is – another enduring truth we must notice.

The world is a more engaging and less dramatic place than writers ever give it credit for being.

Nothing in the world is as hopeful as knowing a woman you like is somewhere thinking about only you. Conversely, there is no badness anywhere as acute as the badness of no woman out in the world thinking about you. Or worse. That one has quit because of some bone-headedness on your part. It is like looking out an airplane window and finding the earth has disappeared. No loneliness can compete with that.

Literature should not be exclusive, it should be inclusive. My general view is that you can’t, based on your own experience, project what a book will do for someone else. That’s why I don’t review books.

But if I had to I would say that because I was his son, I can recognize now that life is short and has inadequacies, that once again it requires crucial avoidances as well as fillings-in to be acceptable.

I had a Tourette’s period. And obsessive compulsive disorder. Things would get in my brain that I couldn’t get out of my brain.

Men are a strange breed.

Any rainy summer morning, of course, has the seeds of gloomy alienation sown in. But a rainy summer morning far from home – when your personal clouds don’t move but hang – can easily produce the feeling of the world as seen from the grave. This I know.

The things you’ll never do don’t get decided at the end of life, but somewhere in the long gray middle, where you can’t see the dim light at either end.