108 Quotes by Richard Yates

The hell with “love” anyway, and with every other phony, time-wasting, half-assed emotion in the world.

How could any healthy girl be expected to care for a mentally unbalanced man?

Hard work, is the best medicine yet devised for all the ills of man- and of woman.

It’s a disease. Nobody thinks or feels or cares any more; nobody gets excited or believes in anything except their own comfortable little God damn mediocrity.

She never seemed to lose her temper, but it would almost have been better if she did, for it was the flat, dry, passionless redundance of her scolding that got everybody down.

He had torn a ragged wound in it, laying open its moist white meat, but it wouldn’t break, it wouldn’t give, and it made the children laugh each time the shovel bounced and rang in his hands. The delicate noise of their laughter, the look of their tulip-soft skin and of their two sunny skulls, as fragile as eggshell, made a terrible contrast to the feel of biting steel and shuddering pulp, and it was his sense of this that made his eyes commit a distortion of truth.

I’m only interested in stories that are about the crushing of the human heart.

Acting might bring on emotional exhaustion, but writing tired your brains out. Writing led to depression and insomnia and walking around all day with a haggard look.

Some things you did were worth regretting; others not.