Richard Yates Quotes

43 quotes in 746 categories

• 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…
• You want to play house, you got to have a job. You want to play very nice house, very sweet house, then you got to…
• He knew it was possible for shame to be nursed and doctored like an illness, if you wanted to keep it separate from the rest…
• It haunted him all night, while he slept alone; it was still there in the morning, when he swallowed his coffee and backed down the…
• If you haven't written a novel by the time you're forty you never will!
• Anybody's marriage might benefit from an occasional embargo on talk.
• 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…
• Remember what Anatole France said about the dog masturbating on your leg--'Sure, it's honest, but who needs it?
• I'm only interested in stories that are about the crushing of the human heart.
• He had won but he didn't feel like a winner.
• He couldn't even tell whether he was angry or contrite, whether it was forgiveness he wanted or the power to forgive.
• God knows there certainly ought to be a window around here somewhere, for all of us.
• The Revolutionary Hill Estates had not been designed to accommodate a tragedy. Even at night, as if on purpose, the development held no looming shadows…
• if you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone.
• Synchronize watches at oh six hundred' says the infantry captain, and each of his huddled lieutenants finds respite from fear in the act of bringing…
• Why did everything always change when all you wanted, all you had ever humbly asked of whatever God there might be, was that certain things…
• ...his job was the very least important part of his life, never to be mentioned except in irony.
• And do you know a funny thing? I'm almost fifty years old and I've never understood anything in my whole life.
• Our ability to measure and apportion time affords an almost endless source of comfort.
• People did change, and a change could be a bloom as well as a withering...

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