108 Quotes by Richard Yates

You’re painfully alive in a drugged and dying culture.

Yes, but still, if it was as adult and sophisticated as all that, why couldn’t she decide what to do with her sweater? Why was she having such an awful time thinking of what in the world she could possibly say to the man?

Surely the man was too old to be her boyfriend – he looked about fifty – but maybe he took a fatherly interest in her; maybe she had come to rely on his plain, straightforward advice in meeting the various uncertainties of her young life.

That’s how we both got committed to this enormous delusion – because that’s what it is, an enormous, obscene delusion – this idea that people have to resign from real life and ‘settle down’ when they have families.

Our ability to measure and apportion time affords an almost endless source of comfort.

I had discovered, or rediscovered, that crying is a pleasure – that it can be a pleasure beyond all reckoning if your head is pressed in your mother’s waist and her hands are on your back, and if she happens to be wearing clean clothes.

People did change, and a change could be a bloom as well as a withering...

Like frustrated suburban wives we fed on each other’s discontent; we became divided into mean little cliques and subdivided into jealously shifting pairs of buddies, and we pieced out our idleness with gossip.

Appalled at his own voice, he wondered why he couldn’t have said he was a social worker or a hospital executive. Would the kids have cared? Why was he spilling his guts instead? Did he think it might make him more interesting in Epstein’s eyes? But what was “interesting” about having been a mental patient? “ – anyway, I was locked up there,” he concluded, and he wondered if Pamela and the others were embarrassed for him.