250 Quotes by Richard Ford

If there’s another thing that sportswriting teaches you, it is that there are no transcendent themes in life. In all cases things are here and they’re over, and that has to be enough.

The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying as a present to myself but haven’t made much progress there – though I need to.

I’m not one of those people who as a writer lets my characters tell me what they want to do or call to me or seek me. I go seeking for things, using them as an agent, really.

Most things don’t stay the way they are very long.

Your life doesn’t mean what you have or what you get. Its what your’e willing to give up.

I knew you could know the words but not match them with the life. But to be able to do it right said something about you. And I didn’t know if my judgment was good enough, or exactly what was good or bad. Though there must be times, I thought, when there was no right thing to know, just as there were times when there was no right thing to do.

A lot of things seem one way but are another. And how a thing seems is often just the game we play to save ourselves from great, panicking pain.

My always needn’t be forever. I’m ready for the plunge, nervy as a cliff-diver. Though if down the line things go rotten we can both climb the cliffs again. Life is long.

Somehow, and for no apparent reason, your decisions got tipped over and you lost your hold. And one day you woke up and you found yourself in the very situation you said you would never ever be in, and you did not know what was most important to you anymore. And after that, it was all over. And I did not want that to happen to me did not, in fact, think it ever would.