Best Richard Yates Quotes
- He found it so easy and so pleasant to cry that he didn’t try to stop for a while, until he realized he was forcing… Coined
- 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. Alone
- She was calm and quiet now with knowing what she had always known, what neither her parents nor Aunt Claire nor Frank nor anyone else… Absolutely
- Know what we did, Lucy? You and me? We spent our whole lives yearning. Isn't that the God damndest thing? Damndest
- He took each fact as it came and let it slip painlessly into the back of his mind, thinking, Okay, okay, I'll think about that… Alert
- Dying for love might be pitiable, but it wasn't much different, finally, from any other kind of dying. Any
- Never say anything that doesn't improve on silence. Improve
- Being alone has nothing to do with how many people are around. Alone
- 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… Absurdities
- What a subtle, treacherous thing it was to let yourself go that way! Because once you've started it was terribly difficult to stop; soon you… All
- A man could rant and smash and grapple with the State Police, and still the sprinklers whirled at dusk on every lawn and the television… Droned
- ...you found you were saying yes when you meant no, and “We’ve got to be together in this thing” when you meant the very opposite… Anyone
- In avoiding specific goals he had avoided specific limitations. For the time being the world, life itself, could be his chosen field. Avoided
- Your cowardly self-delusions about “love” when you know as well as I do that there’s never been anything between us but contempt and distrust and… Alone
- You're painfully alive in a drugged and dying culture. Alive
- 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. Another Human
- Hopeless emptiness. Now you've said it. Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness. Emptiness