217 Quotes by Richard Russo

Miles smiled. "Can you keep a secret?"Bea snorted. "Did I tell you what you were in for if you married my daughter?""No," Miles conceded."Well, then," she said, as if that settled the matter.

An imperfect human heart, perfectly shattered, was her conclusion. A condition so common as to be virtually universal, rendering issues of right and wrong almost incidental.

Like many men addicted to sports, Clive Sr. was also a religious man.

Interesting, Miles thought. Like himself, Father Mark, as a child, had been reassured by the imagined proximity of God, whereas adults, perhaps because they so often were up to no good, took more comfort from His remoteness.

Late middle age, he was coming to understand, was a time of life when everything was predictable and yet somehow you failed to see any of it coming.

To his surprise he...discovered that it was possible to be good at what you had little interest in, just as it had been possible to be bad at something…that you cared about a great deal.

Lincoln couldn't help wondering if what had happened at Rockers was best viewed as an isolated incident or as part of a long-established pattern, one that could be summed up as Teddy's life not, to borrow Coffin's term, working out. Even back at Minerva, Teddy had seemed resigned to the likelihood that it wouldn't. Which begged a question: Had Teddy meekly accepted what he saw as the invisible trajectory of his life, or had he courageously accepted what he couldn't possibly change?

Just because things happen slow doesn't mean you'll be ready for them. If they happened fast, you'd be alert for all kinds of suddenness, aware that speed was trump. "Slow" works in an altogether different principle, on the deceptive impression that there's plenty of time to prepare, which conceals the central fact, that no matter how slow things go, you'll always be slower.

Stories worked much the same way…A false note at the beginning was much more costly than one nearer the end because early errors were part of the foundation.