108 Quotes by Richard Yates

For a year she found an exquisite pain – almost pleasure – in facing the world as if she didn’t care. Look at me, she would say to herself in the middle of a trying day. Look at me: I’m surviving; I’m coping; I’m in control of all this.

The gathering disorder of their lives might still be sorted out and made to fit these rooms.

When you’re talking, Steve,” Jock MacKenzie had told him once, “and I don’t care who it’s to or what it’s about, the important thing is knowing when to stop. Never say anything that doesn’t improve on silence.

Then the fight went out of control. It quivered their arms and legs and wrenched their faces into shapes of hatred, it urged them harder and deeper into each other’s weakest points, showing them cunning ways around each other’s strongholds and quick chances to switch tactics, feint, and strike again. In the space of a gasp for breath it sent their memories racing back over the years for old weapons to rip the scabs off old wounds; it went on and on.

Eleven Kinds of Loneliness and Liars in Love. He died in.

Sometimes it seemed that he’d said six or eight funny things in his life, and that what passed for his sense of humor would always depend on a skillful recycling of old material, over and over again.

Never end a sentence with a preposition, Sobel. You don’t wanna say, ‘gave the plumbers new grounds to bargain on.’ You wanna say, ’gave the plumbers new grounds on which to bargain.

The whole point of crying was to quit before you cornied it up.

I grandi libri, come i grandi amici, devono essere condivisi.