250 Quotes by Richard Ford

I’m intrigued by how ordinary behavior exists so close beside its opposite.

And I had the feeling he was far out ahead of me then and in many things. Any time spent with your child is partly a damn sad time, the sadness of life a-going, bright, vivid, each time a last. A loss. A glimpse into what could’ve been. It can be corrupting. I.

I think I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb signifies to be; to do; to suffer. I signify all three.

We are past the end of things now, but I don’t want to leave.

It’s shocking to note how close we play to unwelcome realizations, and yet how our ongoing ignorance makes so much of life possible.

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

You can’t always go to the well and have things be funny.

In the thirties, after they were married, they lived simply and only for each other and for the day. They drank some, lived on the road with my father’s salesman’s job. They had a good time and felt they had little to look back on, and didn’t look.

America beats on you so hard the whole time. You are constantly being pummeled by other people’s rights and their sense of patriotism.