217 Quotes by Richard Russo

One of the odd things about middle age, he concluded, was the strange decisions a man discovers he’s made by not really making them, like allowing friends to drift away through simple neglect.

Movies have to handle time very efficiently. They’re about stringing scenes together in the present. Novels aren’t necessarily about that.

I put myself up for full professor, an act of such unprecedented and unmitigated arrogance that the committee approved it, thus effectively rooting me to the scene of the crime, too weighed down by tenure, rank, and salary to be marketable ever again.

Because yank out one thread from the fabric of human destiny, and everything unravels. Though it could also be said that things have a tendency to unravel regardless.

It’s possible to overlook character flaws of in-laws for the simple reason that you feel neither responsible for them nor genetically implicated.

Also her perfume, which mingled with the crisp air off the lake below, creating an intoxicating mixture of damp earth and leaves and water and girl. Not woman, in Sully’s opinion. Girl.

In this instance, she understood completely what the endorsement of a fool was worth.

I’ll tell you one thing, though. It’s a terrible thing to be a disappointment to a good woman.

My books are elegiac in the sense that they’re odes to a nation that even I sometimes think may not exist anymore except in my memory and my imagination.