28 quotes found
“Never say anything that doesn't improve on silence.”
“Are artists and writers the only people entitled to lives of their own?”
“if you dont try at anything, you cant fail it takes back bone to lead the life you want”
“if you don’t try at anything, you can’t fail… it takes back bone to lead the life you want”
“Dying for love might be pitiable, but it wasn't much different, finally, from any other kind of dying.”
“So it hadnt been wrong or dishonest of her to say no this morning, when he asked if she hated him, any more than it had been wrong or dishonest to serve him the elaborate breakfast and to show the ...”
“Intelligent, thinking people could take things like this in their stride, just as they took the larger absurdities of deadly dull jobs in the city and deadly dull homes in the suburbs. Economic cir...”
“If my work has a theme, I suspect it is a simple one: that most human beings are inescapably alone, and therein lies their tragedy.”
“You see? I dont know what mature means, either, and you could talk all night and I still wouldnt know. Its all just words to me, Frank. I watch you talking and I think: Isnt that amazing? He really...”
“Warren Cox, God knew, was no prize; a commercial person, a sales person, the kind of man who said things like "x numbers of dollars". At lunch today, laboriously trying to explain some business pro...”
“He couldn't even tell whether he was angry or contrite, whether it was forgiveness he wanted or the power to forgive.”
“The whole point of crying was to quit before you cornied it up. The whole point of grief itself was to cut it out while it was still honest, while it still meant something. Because the thing was so...”
“And Emily had yet to shed a single tear. It troubled her all the way back to the city, and she rode with one hand sandwiched between her cheek and the cool, shuddering glass of the limousine window...”
“With their mother lying in a coma twenty miles away, they clung together drunkenly and wept for the loss of their father.”
“How small and neat and comically serious the other men looked, with their grey-flecked crew cuts and their button-down collars and their brisk little hurrying feet! There were endless desperate swa...”
“Don't worry, I can't be bothered! You're not worth the trouble it would take to hit you! You're not worth the powder it would take to blow you up. You are an empty, empty, hollow shell of a woman. ...”
“if you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone.”
“I seem to have to lost confidence in just about everything else. I've come to believe that only a very, very few matters in the world can ever be trusted to make sense.”
“Our ability to measure and apportion time affords an almost endless source of comfort.Synchronise watches at oh six hundred, says the infantry captain, and each of his huddled lieutenants finds a r...”
“As a writer, I like the list of "things to strive for" that Richard Yates kept above his typewriter:genuine claritygenuine feelingthe right wordthe exact English sentencethe eloquent detailthe rigo...”
“Do you know what the definition of insane is? Yes. Its the inability to relate to another human being. Its the inability to love.”
