108 Quotes by Richard Yates

If you haven’t written a novel by the time you’re forty you never will!

Every man has a right to keep his own sentiments if he pleases.

In avoiding specific goals he had avoided specific limitations. For the time being the world, life itself, could be his chosen field.

On their right, in a black marsh, the spring peepers were in full and desperate song.

Anybody’s marriage might benefit from an occasional embargo on talk.

I’m sure it’s probably a mistake to try and draw your own conclusions from the things you read in books. Who knows?

Oh, Jesus, it was the loveliest and most terrible thing he’d ever seen; it was the source of the world; and his shame was so immediate that he let the fabric slip back into place after only a second or two.

Everybody’s essentially alone’, she’d told him, and he was beginning to see a lot of truth in that. Besides: now that he was older, and now that he was home, it might not even matter how the story turned out in the end.

And all because, in a sentimentally lonely time long ago, she had found it easy and agreeable to believe whatever this one particular boy felt like saying, and to repay him for that pleasure by telling easy, agreeable lies of her own, until each was saying what the other most wanted to hear...