39 Quotes by Richard House

What is awful is that there were always reasons to do one thing and not another, but these reasons disappear. You don’t remember them. They just go, and you’re left with what you did or didn’t do, and this idea that you didn’t do enough. The truth isn’t always so easy. You can’t think yourself back into that place that made everything how it was.

The older they became the less time they spent together, and the less time they spent together the less dissatisfaction they felt toward each other.

This man threatened the volunteer then returned twenty minutes later to beat him up. At a charity bonfire. In Wilford. It’s not the Middle East,” she said, “it’s Wilford, Nottingham. I don’t want to be among these people. They complain about a charity bonfire, and right on their doorstep there are children as young as eleven selling drugs along the river.

They weren’t a couple. They were two people making do.

What you have to understand, he says, is the mentality of the Iraqi versus the mentality of the average Westerner.

Pakosta shrugged. “The problem is how they drive. People fall asleep. Lose the road. They won’t slow down or stop. I’m sick of picking dogs out of fenders.

He calls these projects gophers, as in, go-for-the-money (don’t-deliver-the-project).

The secret to disappearing is to stay where you are.

Correggio, Caravaggio, Titian, Tintoretto. In them she saw distance and cruelty. Bodies pierced, flayed, crucified. A parade of morbid flesh.