250 Quotes by Richard Ford

And what there is to learn from almost any human experience is that your own interests usually do not come first where other people are concerned – even the people who love you – and that is all right. It can be lived with.

My father died in my arms. That’s tumult. That’s everything exploding.

It’s not an unusual American story. Just as there’s no right way to plan a life and no right way to live one – only plenty of wrong ways.

Anyone could be anyone else in most ways. Face the facts.

It was on such a night as this that the unhappy things came about.

I’m an equal opportunity reader – although I don’t much read plays. And since I was raised a Presbyterian, pretty much all pleasures are guilty.

At the exact moment any decision seems to be being made, it’s usually long after the real decision was actually made – like light we see emitted from stars.

At heart, of course, a story itself is consolation’s instrument.

The longer they stayed on, and the better they knew each other, the better she at least could see their mistake, and the more misguided their lives became – like a long proof in mathematics in which the first calculation is wrong, following which all other calculations move you further away from how things were when they made sense.