Richard Ford Quotes

If you lose all hope, you can always find it again.

~ Richard Ford

It is no loss to mankind when one writer decides to call it a day. When a tree falls in the forest, who cares but the monkeys?

~ Richard Ford

And I think that in myself (and perhaps evident in what I write) fear of loss and the corresponding instinct to protect myself against loss are potent forces.

~ Richard Ford

I had written all I was going to write, if the truth had been known, and there is nothing wrong with that. If more writers knew that, the world would be saved a lot of bad books, and more people--men and women alike--could go on to happier, more productive lives.

~ Richard Ford

Real mystery - the very reason to read (and certainly write) any book - was to them a thing to dismantle, distill and mine out into rubble they could tyrannize into sorry but more permanent explanations; monuments to themselves, in other words. In my view all teachers should be required to stop teaching at age thirty-two and not allowed to resume until they're sixty-five, so that they can live their lives, not teach them away - live lives full of ambiguity and transience and regret and wonder, be asked to explain nothing in public until very near the end when they can't do anything else. Explaining is where we all get into trouble.

~ Richard Ford

People surprise you, Frank, with just how fuckin stupid they are.

~ Richard Ford

I know you can dream your way through an otherwise fine life, and never wake up, which is what I almost did.

~ Richard Ford

Humans generally get out the gist of what they need to say right at the beginning, then spend forever qualifying, contradicting, burnishing or taking important things back. Yor rareley miss anything by cutting most people off after two sentences.

~ Richard Ford

Meeting a girl, falling in love, marrying her, moving to Connecticut, buying a fucking house, starting a life with her and thinking you really knew anything about her--the last part was a complete fiction, which made all the rest a joke.

~ Richard Ford

They may already know too much about their mother and father--nothing being more factual than divorce, where so much has to be explained and worked through intelligently (though they have tried to stay equable). I've noticed this is often the time when children begin calling their parents by their first names, becoming little ironists after their parents' faults. What could be lonelier for a parent than to be criticized by his child on a first-name basis?

~ Richard Ford

Finally I do like best of all stories whose necessity is in the implied recognition that someplace out there there exists an urgency—a chaos—, an insanity, a misrule of some dire sort which can end life as we know it but for the fact that this very story is written, this order found, this style determined, the worst averted, and we are beneficiaries of that order by being readers.

~ Richard Ford

It's odd to imagine, of course: you pass a car on a lonely rural highway; you sit beside a man in a diner and share views with him; you wait behind a customer checking into a motel, a friendly man with a winning smile and twinkling hazel eyes, who's happy to fill you in on his life's story and wants you to like him - odd to think this man is cruising around with a loaded pistol, making up his mind about which bank he'll soon rob.' - Richard Ford, Canada

~ Richard Ford

Someone ... tell us what's important, because we no longer know.

~ Richard Ford

My parents...were people running from the past, who didn't look back at much if they could help it, and whose whole life always lay somewhere in the offing.

~ Richard Ford

Some things can't be explained. They just are. And after a while they disappear, usually forever, or become interesting in another way. Literature's consolations are always temporary, while life is quick to begin again. It is better not even to look so hard, to leave off explaining. Nothing makes me more queasy than to spend time with people who don't know that and who can't forget, and for whom such knowledge isn't a cornerstone of life.

~ Richard Ford

It was if we all sensed we'd be gone someday soon in a sudden instant--often it happened in the middle of the night--and didn't want to get involved. Or else it was that none of us wanted to know anybody later on who was the way we were now.

~ Richard Ford

Possibly in the lobby she saw someone who reminded her too much of herself (that can happen to inexperienced travelers). Or worse. That no one there reminded her of anyone she ever knew.

~ Richard Ford

Something draws you... An impatience with your own ignorance.

~ Richard Ford

Loneliness, I've read, is like being in a long line, waiting to reach the front where it's promised something good will happen. Only the line never moves, and other people are always coming in ahead of you, and the front, the place where you want to be, is always farther and farther away until you no longer believe it has anything to offer you.

~ Richard Ford

We are past the end of things now, but I don't want to leave.

~ Richard Ford

For writers - even sportswriters - bad news is always easier than good, since it is, after all, more familiar.

~ Richard Ford

She ordered a martini and encouraged me to, but said she couldn't drink it with her medication. She just liked seeing it in front of her, like the old days, all set to do its little magic.

~ Richard Ford

One of the down-side factors to living alone is that you sometimes get overly absorbed with how exact segments of time are consumed, and can begin to feel a pleasure with life that is hopelessly tinged with longing.

~ Richard Ford

I'm intrigued by how ordinary behavior exists so close beside its opposite.

~ Richard Ford

It was as if they'd discovered something that had once been there but had gotten hidden or misunderstood or forgotten over time, and they were charmed by it once more, and by one another. Which seems only right and expectable for married people. They caught a glimpse of the person they fell in love with, and who sustained life. For some, that vision must never dim - as is true of me. But it was odd that our parents should catch their glimpse, and have frustration, anxiety and worry pass away like clouds dispersing after a storm, refind their best selves, but for that glimpse to happen just before landing our family in ruin.

~ Richard Ford

The longer they stayed on, and the better they knew each other, the better she at least could see their mistake, and the more misguided their lives became—like a long proof in mathematics in which the first calculation is wrong, following which all other calculations move you further away from how things were when they made sense.

~ Richard Ford

We do not, after all, deal in truths, only potentialities. Too much truth can be worse than death, and last longer.

~ Richard Ford

Our ex-wifes always harbour secrets about us that make them irresistable. Until, of course, we remember who we are and what we did and why we are not married anymore.

~ Richard Ford

Dreaminess is, among other things, a state of suspended recognition, and a response to too much useless and complicated factuality. Its symptoms can be a long-term interest in the weather, or a sustained soaring feeling, or a bout of the stares that you sometimes can not even know about except in retrospect, when the time may seem fogged.

~ Richard Ford

He was like my father. They each wanted me to be their audience, to hear the things they needed to express.

~ Richard Ford

The saved moment is the true art of love.

~ Richard Ford

In their faces--plenty of them were handsome, but ruined--I've seen the remnants of who they almost succeeded in being but failed to be, before becoming themselves.

~ Richard Ford

America beats on you so hard the whole time. You are constantly being pummeled by other people's rights and their sense of patriotism.

~ Richard Ford