217 Quotes by Richard Russo

It was hard to imagine him in love. I knew that he and my mother must have once felt passion, since that was what love entailed, but I was grateful that over time the madness had evolved into something more like friendship or a business partnership, something I myself could be an integral part of. Even seeing my father recollect passion was disconcerting.

If my career continues along its current arc, people will probably look at me and see a writer who is obsessed with the relationship between rich and poor and with how the rich somehow or other always manage to betray the poor, even when they don’t mean to.

I don’t think there’s a shortage of material in the world. Or in my head. I just pray for continued good health, because I’ve got other stories to tell.

For years now he’d believed he had no further urgent business with this world, or it with him. But it could be he was wrong.

Maybe this was the unstated purpose of education, to get young people to see the world through the tired eyes of age: disappointment and exhaustion and defeat masquerading as wisdom.

I also think it’s possible for us to be better people tomorrow than we are today.” He had no idea, of course, whether any of these things were true, in whole or in part. Still, what possible good could come of believing otherwise? –.

For people who dealt largely in dreams, his father was fond of observing, realtors were a surprisingly unromantic bunch, like card counters in a Vegas casino.

If she wanted to go back to Boston so damn bad, she should just do it. He said this knowing full well she wouldn’t, for it was the particular curse of the Whiting men that their wives remained loyal to them out of spite. By.

Intellectual curiosity, moreover, was not the same as talent, and he gradually came to understand that his own particular aptitude was for fixing things. From an early age he’d possessed an intuitive grasp of how and why things went off the rails, as well as how to get them back on again. He enjoyed taking things apart and putting them back together.