What if all everybody needed in the world was to be sure of one friend? What if you were the one, and you refused to say those simple words? Richard Russo More Quotes by Richard Russo More Quotes From Richard Russo Who but an English professor would threaten to kill a duck a day and hold up a goose as an example? Richard Russo professors ducks example A short story is something that I think can be intuited and envisioned and held in your mind almost at once. Richard Russo stories mind thinking Structure is one of the things that I always hope will reveal itself to me. Richard Russo structure ... Baggott enjoys living on the knife edge between hilarity and heartbreak and that makes her a writer after my own heart. Richard Russo hilarity knives heart I think a lot of what is going on with kids who get pushed too far and attempt either murder or suicide is that they are trying to deal with their own non-existence for the people who are supposed to care most for them. Richard Russo suicide kids thinking Where was the middle ground between a sense of adventure and just plain sense? Richard Russo middle-ground middle adventure To weigh and evaluate a vast grid of information, much of it meaningless, and to arrive at sensible, if erroneous, conclusions, is a skill not to be sneezed at. Richard Russo grids information skills Steve Yarbrough's Safe from the Neighbors will take your breath away. Ambitious, funny, sad, smart, and beautifully crafted, it's everything a novel should be. Richard Russo ambitious smart safe One of the nice things about our marriage, at least to my way of thinking, is that my wife and I no longer have to argue every thing through. We each know what the other will say, and so the saying becomes an unnecessary formality. No doubt some marriage counselor would explain to us that our problem is a failure to communicate, but to my way of thinking we've worked long and hard to achieve this silence, Lily's and mine, so fraught with mutual understanding. Richard Russo nice long thinking The line of gray along the horizon is brighter now, and with the coming light I feel a certainty: that there is, despite our wild imaginings, only one life. The ghostly others, no matter how real they seem, no matter how badly we need them, are phantoms. The one life we're left with is sufficient to fill and refill our imperfect hearts with joy, and then to shatter them. And it never, ever lets up. Richard Russo light real heart You can be interested in a Jane Smiley novel whether or not anyone says a word. She enters into her characters thoughts with great understanding and depth. Richard Russo depth understanding character My books are elegiac in the sense that they're odes to a nation that even I sometimes think may not exist anymore except in my memory and my imagination. Richard Russo memories book thinking You just kind of have faith. If that sounds kind of mystical, it's because I really don't know how it works, but I trust that it does. I try to write the way I read, in order to find out what happens next. Richard Russo faith writing order My dad had this rock hard body and would work 12- to 13-hour days. The guys he worked with were scrap-iron guys. Nobody on that road crew had read a book in 10 years, but there was something about the way they lived I really admired. Richard Russo iron dad book I can be glib and truthful all at once. Richard Russo truthful i-can I get and read an enormous number of first novels. Richard Russo enormous numbers firsts I'll tell you one thing, though. It's a terrible thing to be a disappointment to a good woman. Richard Russo good-woman terrible disappointment I told him the truth, that I loved him and didn't regret anything about our lives together. But do we ever 'tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God' as my father used to say, to those we love? Or even to ourselves? Don't even the best and most fortunate of lives hint at other possibilities, at a different kind of sweetness and, yes, bitterness too? Isn't this why we can't help feeling cheated, even when we know we haven't been? Richard Russo regret feelings father If you work at comedy too laboriously, you can kill what's funny in the joke. Richard Russo jokes comedy ifs To expect reason is where the fallacy lies. Richard Russo fallacy reason lying
