if you don’t try at anything, you can’t fail… it takes back bone to lead the life you want — Richard Yates Copy Share Image
“The movies were wonderful because they took you out of yourself, and at the same time they gave you a sense of… — Richard Yates Copy Share Image
“You still felt that life was passing you by? Sort of. I still had this idea that there was a whole world… — Richard Yates Copy Share Image
“Don't you see what I'm saying? It's got nothing to do with definite, measurable talents - it's your very essence that's being… — Richard Yates Copy Share Image
“Rachel came carefully downstairs one morning, in a dressing gown that wasn't quite clean, and stood at the brink of the living… — Richard Yates Copy Share Image
“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… — Richard Yates Copy Share Image
“Sometimes it seemed that he'd said six or eight funny things in his life, and that what passed for his sense of… — Richard Yates Copy Share Image
“Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life, and looking back it always seemed that the trouble began with their… — Richard Yates Copy Share Image
“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… — Richard Yates Copy Share Image
“They could lie drowsing now under the sound of kindly voices in the living room, a sound whose intricately rhythmic rise and… — Richard Yates Copy Share Image
...his job was the very least important part of his life, never to be mentioned except in irony. — Richard Yates Copy Share Image
“You see? I don’t know what ‘mature’ means, either, and you could talk all night and I still wouldn’t know. It’s all… — Richard Yates Copy Share Image
“It depressed him to consider how much energy he had wasted, over the years, in the self-denying posture of apology. From now… — Richard Yates Copy Share Image
And do you know a funny thing? I'm almost fifty years old and I've never understood anything in my whole life. — Richard Yates Copy Share Image
He knew it was possible for shame to be nursed and doctored like an illness, if you wanted to keep it separate… — Richard Yates Copy Share Image
“All her life, from the time she was eight or nine years old, Gloria had relied on a neat, nearly automatic little… — Richard Yates Copy Share Image
“Wasn’t it true, then, that everything in his life from that point on had been a succession of things he hadn’t really… — Richard Yates Copy Share Image
“Wasn’t it true, then, that everything in his life from that point on had been a succession of things he hadn’t really… — Richard Yates Copy Share Image
She just happened to feel like it. Wasn’t that after all, the only reason there was? Had she ever had a less… — Richard Yates Copy Share Image
“Rachel was a girl who depended on small, recurrent rituals - that was one of the things he'd come to know about her, and… — Richard Yates Copy Share Image
“In the East, he then believed, a man went to college not for vocational training but in disciplined search for wisdom and beauty, and… — Richard Yates Copy Share Image
God knows there certainly ought to be a window around here somewhere, for all of us. — Richard Yates Copy Share Image
“And you know what else I used to love? I loved to watch you get into your car and drive away - just because… — Richard Yates Copy Share Image
if you don’t try at anything, you can’t fail… it takes back bone to lead the life you want — Richard Yates Copy Share Image
“The movies were wonderful because they took you out of yourself, and at the same time they gave you a sense of being whole.… — Richard Yates Copy Share Image
Do you know what the definition of insane is? Yes. It’s the inability to relate to another human being. It’s the inability to love. — Richard Yates Copy Share Image
“It had been easy to decide in favor of love on Bethune Street, in favor of walking proud and naked on the grass rug… — Richard Yates Copy Share Image
Anybody's marriage might benefit from an occasional embargo on talk. — Richard Yates Copy Share Image
“Sometimes in dreams there are visions of the past. For that reason Alice Prentice had always welcomed sleep, but she suffered an insomniac's dread… — Richard Yates Copy Share Image
“There she was, lying on a single bed in a room so small that there wasn't even space for a chair, and the first… — Richard Yates Copy Share Image
