Famous Quotes & Sayings

Richard Russo Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Richard Russo.

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Famous Quotes By Richard Russo

Richard Russo Quotes 759286

They're around back," she calls down when Julie and I get out. "Planning their strategy." "Good for them," I say, confident that no strategy that isn't grounded in chaos theory is likely to work against a man like me. — Richard Russo

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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

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Like I said, what makes people tick isn't neccessarily what makes them good. Fast-forward, — Richard Russo

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Who but an English professor would threaten to kill a duck a day and hold up a goose as an example? — Richard Russo

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(God) seemed to know everything that was in her heart and to understand that nothing dwelt there that wasn't absolutely necessary to her survival. — Richard Russo

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Grace believed that those who could see their duty clearly were required by God to do the heavy lifting for the morally blind. Where — Richard Russo

Richard Russo Quotes 156405

ragged piece of thin glass jutted out of the socket, all that was left of the — Richard Russo

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It's not an easy time for any parent, this moment when the realization dawns that you've given birth to something that will never see things the way you do, despite the fact that it is your living legacy, that it bears your name. — Richard Russo

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No. Simplicity and justice require that thought and deed not be carelessly elided. — Richard Russo

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Also her perfume, which mingled with the crisp air off the lake below, creating an intoxicating mixture of damp earth and leaves and water and girl. Not woman, in Sully's opinion. Girl. — Richard Russo

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I just have this feeling that if it weren't for the Gloversville Free Library that I probably would not be a writer. — Richard Russo

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To his surprise he ... discovered that it was possible to be good at what you had little interest in, just as it had been possible to be bad at something ... that you cared about a great deal. — Richard Russo

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It always amazed me how little he understood what I was feeling. It meant, among other things, that my understanding of him probably wasn't much better. — Richard Russo

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At the risk of appearing disingenuous, I don't really think of myself as 'writing humor.' I'm simply reporting on the world I observe, which is frequently hilarious. — Richard Russo

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One of the odd things about middle age, he concluded, was the strange decisions a man discovers he's made by not really making them, like allowing friends to drift away through simple neglect. — Richard Russo

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Interesting, Miles thought. Like himself, Father Mark, as a child, had been reassured by the imagined proximity of God, whereas adults, perhaps because they so often were up to no good, took more comfort from His remoteness. — Richard Russo

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And there comes a time in your life when you realize that if you don't take the opportunity to be happy, you may never get another chance again. — Richard Russo

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For fairness and loyalty, however important to the head, were issues that could seldom be squared in the human heart, at the deepest depths of which lay the mystery of affection, of love, which you either felt or you didn't, pure as instinct, which seized you, not the other way around, making a mockery of words like "should" and "ought". The human heart, where compromise could not be struck, not ever. Where transgressions exacted a terrible price. Where tangled black limbs fell. Where the boom got lowered. — Richard Russo

Richard Russo Quotes 1971668

Late middle age, he was coming to understand, was a time of life when everything was predictable and yet somehow you failed to see any of it coming. — Richard Russo

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I think that if people are instructed about anything, it should be about the nature of cruelty. And about why people behave so cruelly to each other. And what kind of satisfactions they derive from it. And why there is always a cost, and a price to be paid. — Richard Russo

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Novel writing is mostly triage (this now, that later) and obstinacy. Trying something, and when that doesn't work, trying something else. Welcoming clutter Surrendering a good idea for a better one. Knowing you won't find the finish line for a year or two, or five ... — Richard Russo

Richard Russo Quotes 327554

Whatever you're working on, take small bites. The task will not be overwhelming if you can reduce it to its smallest component. — Richard Russo

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I've always known that there's more going on inside me than finds its way into the world, but this is probably true of everyone. Who doesn't regret that he isn't more fully understood? — Richard Russo

Richard Russo Quotes 2203903

If you paid me for work," continued Max, whose rhetoric was more sophisticated than you might expect from a man with food in his beard, "I wouldn't have to feel worthless. There's not law says old people have to feel worthless all the while, you know. You paid me, I'd have some dignity."
Now it was Mile's turn to nod and smile agreeably. "I think the dignity ship set sail a long time ago, Dad. — Richard Russo

Richard Russo Quotes 317407

Was anything in the world truer than that intuitive leap of the heart? — Richard Russo

Richard Russo Quotes 353528

... a story is like a virus that can rage only for as long as there are new hosts to infect. — Richard Russo

Richard Russo Quotes 1318328

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

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To his surprise, she leaned over and kissed him on the forehead, a kiss so full of affection that it dispelled the awkwardness, even as it caused Miles' heart to plummet, because all kisses are calibrated, and this one revealed the great chasm between affection and love. — Richard Russo

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After all, what was the whole wide world but a place for people to yearn for their heart's impossible desires, for those desires to become entrenched in defiance of logic, plausibility, and even the passage of time, as eternal as polished marble. — Richard Russo

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If you work at comedy too laboriously, you can kill what's funny in the joke. — Richard Russo

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Miles couldn't help admiring women for their ability to dismiss the evidence of their senses. If that's what explained it. If it wasn't simply that from time to time they were unaccountably drawn to the grotesque. — Richard Russo

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He was pouring vinegar onto the hot grill, where it sputtered and foamed and hissed. The air was full of it for a few seconds, enough to get everyone at the counter teared up, but just as quickly it was gone, with an implicit promise that anything so intensely horrible would be design pass swiftly. — Richard Russo

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I know," Peter said, zipping Will's jacket. The little boy, who had apparently had his throat zipped into his zipper at some point, always put his mittened hand beneath his chin to prevent it from happening again. Sully — Richard Russo

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Throughout his life a case study underachiever, Sully - people still remarked - was nobody's fool, a phrase that Sully no doubt appreciated without ever sensing its literal application - that at sixty, he was divorced from his own wife, carrying on halfheartedly with another man's, estranged from his son, devoid of self-knowledge, badly crippled and virtually unemployable - all of which he stubbornly confused with independence. — Richard Russo

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Since turning in his resignation, he'd been wondering what he might do next. Suddenly his path seemed clear. He would become an alcoholic. He — Richard Russo

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That afternoon I came to understand that one of the deepest purposes of intellectual sophistication is to provide distance between us and our most disturbing personal truths and gnawing fears. — Richard Russo

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In the end it all came down to companionship, to friendship, to sacrifice, to compromise. — Richard Russo

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I suppose all writers worry about the well running dry. — Richard Russo

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She looked like a woman who had spent her whole life waiting in line. — Richard Russo

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As I drift back into sleep, I can't help thinking that it's a wonderful thing to be right about the world. To weigh the evidence, always incomplete, and correctly intuit the whole, to see the world in a grain of sand, to recognize its beauty, its simplicity, its truth. It's as close as we get to God in this life, and reside in the glow of such brief flashes of understanding, fully awake, sometimes for two or three seconds, at peace with our existence. And then back to sleep we go. — Richard Russo

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witness the sad demise of fundamental Western values. Pride. Order. Personal responsibility. — Richard Russo

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Knowing and knowing what to do about it were two different things. — Richard Russo

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She had always seemed to him to be deep-down wild, the wilder because she harnessed that wildness most of the time. — Richard Russo

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Rub wiped his nose on his sleeve. "I just wisht - " "What?" Rub sighed. Where to begin? "That I'd be nicer to you?" He shrugged again, but this was the gist of it, Sully could tell. "I wish I would, too," he said, and for some reason this seemed to cheer Rub up. — Richard Russo

Richard Russo Quotes 2143862

A plot, I used to remind my students, is not merely a sequence of events: "A" followed by "B" followed by "C" followed by "D." Rather, it's a series of events linked by cause and effect: "A" causes "B," which causes "C," and so on. True, a person's (or a fictional character's) destiny may be more than the sum of his choices
fate and luck play a role as well
but only scientists (and not all of them) believe that free will is a sham. People in life
and therefore in fiction
must choose, and their choices must have meaningful consequences. Otherwise, there's no story. — Richard Russo

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Whereas God, for reasons of His own, sometimes chooses to let the machine answer. The Supreme Being is unavailable to come to the phone at this time, but He wants you to know what your call is important to Him. In the meantime, for sins of pride, press one. For avarice, press two ... — Richard Russo

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Odd that the future should be so difficult to bring into focus when the past, uninvited, offered itself up so easily for inspection. — Richard Russo

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Like many men addicted to sports, Clive Sr. was also a religious man. — Richard Russo

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You can't make a writer without first making a reader, and that's what my mother made me. — Richard Russo

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The cutthroat savagery of high school romance inspired in nearly all adults a collective amnesia. Having survived it themselves, they locked those memories far away in some dark chamber of their subconscious where things that are too terrible to contemplate are permanently stored. — Richard Russo

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Lives are rivers. We imagine we can direct their paths, though in the end there's but one destination, and we end up being true to ourselves only because we have no choice. — Richard Russo

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If my career continues along its current arc, people will probably look at me and see a writer who is obsessed with the relationship between rich and poor and with how the rich somehow or other always manage to betray the poor, even when they don't mean to. — Richard Russo

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They stayed, many of them, because staying was easier and less scary than leaving, — Richard Russo

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Writers are people who put pen to paper every day. — Richard Russo

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I read pretty voraciously. If it's good, I don't care what it is. — Richard Russo

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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

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Baggott enjoys living on the knife edge between hilarity and heartbreak and that makes her a writer after my own heart. — Richard Russo

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Whereas some people's attitude suggested that perhaps they knew something you didn't, Mrs. Whiting's implied that she knew everything you didn't. She alone had been paying attention, so it was her duty to bring you at least partially up to speed. — Richard Russo

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Come sit on my lap. I want to hear all about your sexual harassment lunch.
-Hank to his secretary, Rachel — Richard Russo

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Ultimately, your theme will find you. You don't have to go looking for it. — Richard Russo

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People sometimes get in the habit of being loyal to a mistake. — Richard Russo

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I don't think America has ever had a center the way London is the center of England or Dublin is the center of Ireland. — Richard Russo

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Miss Beryl: Doesn't it bother you that you haven't done more with the life God gave you?
Sully: Not often. Now and then. — Richard Russo

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People actually seemed to enjoy recalling that on a Saturday afternoon forty years ago Empire Avenue was bustling with people and cars and commerce, whereas now, of course, you could strafe it with automatic weapons and not harm a soul. — Richard Russo

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So what? Few men, Miles reflected, lived so comfortably within the confines of a two.word personal philosophy. — Richard Russo

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What does it feel like to be a parent? What does it feel like to be a child? And that's what stories do. They bring you there. They offer a dramatic explanation, which is always different from an expository explanation. — Richard Russo

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Straight Man: But my daughter belongs to a talk show generation that seems to be losing the ability to discriminate between public and private woes. — Richard Russo

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Go to it. Be bold. Be true. Be kind. Rotate your tires. Don't drink so much. There aren't going to be enough liver transplants to go around. — Richard Russo

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If she wanted to go back to Boston so damn bad, she should just do it. He said this knowing full well she wouldn't, for it was the particular curse of the Whiting men that their wives remained loyal to them out of spite. By — Richard Russo

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Though here his voice faltered, because he knew as well as she did what came next, what words came next. If he could speak them, he might even convince her they were true, as his father had convinced his mother that Browning summer. It was the worst lie there was, imprisoning and ultimately embittering the hearer, playing upon her terrible need to believe. He could feel the I love you forming on his lips. Would he have said it if she hadn't interrupted? — Richard Russo

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People in small towns, much more than in cities, share a destiny. — Richard Russo

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I also think it's possible for us to be better people tomorrow than we are today." He had no idea, of course, whether any of these things were true, in whole or in part. Still, what possible good could come of believing otherwise? - — Richard Russo

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Movies have to handle time very efficiently. They're about stringing scenes together in the present. Novels aren't necessarily about that. — Richard Russo

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That she should so puzzled him that he even questioned his behavior, entertaining, albeit briefly, the idea that he might in some fashion be responsible for the apparition of his once loving wife, who had faithfully awaited his return from overseas, now calmly and purposefully blasting away, without visible remorse, in the general direction of his life and property. They — Richard Russo

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She couldn't quite see herself in it. When they were done, I read the Shakespeare sonnet that begins "Fear no more the heat o' the Sun," partly because it was appropriate to the occasion and one of the most beautiful poems in the language, but also because I hoped it might hide from my loved ones the fact that I myself had nothing to say, that while part of me was here with them on this beloved shore, another part was wandering, as it had been for months, in a barren, uninhabited landscape not unlike the one in my dream. I realized I'd felt like this for a while. Though life had gone on since my mother's death - Kate had gotten married, I'd finally published another book and gone on tour with it - some sort of internal-pause button had been pushed, allowing another part of me, one I'd specifically kept sequestered to deal with my mother, to fall silent. Since her death, Barbara and I had gone through all her things and settled her affairs, but we'd barely spoken of her. — Richard Russo

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Bookstores, like libraries, are the physical manifestation of the wide world's longest, most thrilling conversation. — Richard Russo

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Which is why we have spouses and children and parents and colleagues and friends, because someone has to know us better than we know ourselves. We need them to tell us. We need them to say, I know you, Al. You are not the kind of man who. — Richard Russo

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My God, he couldn't help thinking, how terrible it is to be that age, to have emotions so near the surface that the slightest turbulence causes them to boil over. That, very simply, was what adulthood must be all about
acquiring the skill to bury things more deeply. Out of sight and, whenever possible, out of mind. — Richard Russo

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When you don't know what to do, try something; if that doesn't work, try something else. — Richard Russo

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He had to comfort himself with the firm conviction that most of what he objected to in Mohawk and the world at large was not the result of people reading the wrong books, but rather of not reading any at all. — Richard Russo

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He was an amiable man who believed in amiable solutions, who forgave easily and couldn't understand that other people derived pleasure from withholding the very thing he always gave so freely. — Richard Russo

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Even at its most perceptive, sociology deals in abstractions. — Richard Russo

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The task he has chosen for himself, of wooing my mother with a bright red pickup truck, a Patsy Cline tape, and a string of malapropisms, is ample justification to me for not taking the world too seriously, its relentless heartbreak notwithstanding. — Richard Russo

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He'd discovered that his memories of that summer were like bad movie montages - young lovers tossing a Frisbee in the park, sharing a melting ice-cream cone, bicycling along the river, laughing, talking, kissing, a sappy score drowning out the dialogue because the screenwriter had no idea what these two people might say to each other. — Richard Russo

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A lot of my characters in all of my books have a self-destructive urge. They'll do precisely the thing that they know is wrong, take a perverse delight in doing the wrong thing. — Richard Russo

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By ignoring a lot of American culture you can write more interesting stories. Unfortunately, if you were writing about America as it is, you'd be writing about a lot of people sitting in front of television sets. — Richard Russo

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You can't possibly judge your ability to control something until you've experienced the extremes of its capabilities. Do you understand? — Richard Russo

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I was the one who did come through that door. You were the one she was waiting for. — Richard Russo

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Amazing, isn't it, when you think about it, how the world keeps on turning, no matter how fucked up things get?" In — Richard Russo

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When I look back over my novels what I find is that when I think I'm finished with a theme, I'm generally not. And usually themes will recur from novel to novel in odd, new guises. — Richard Russo

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We wear the chains we forge in life, — Richard Russo

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I've never written nearly as much about place as people seem to think I do. I just write about class. — Richard Russo

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To his surprise he also discovered that it was possible to be good at what you had little interest in, just as it had been possible to be bad at something, whether painting or poetry, that you cared about a great deal. — Richard Russo

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People often ask me how I make things funny. I don't make things funny. — Richard Russo

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Worse, I have to admit to feeling the jealousy of one crab for another that has managed to climb out of the barrel. — Richard Russo

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A short story is something that I think can be intuited and envisioned and held in your mind almost at once. — Richard Russo

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Not giving a shit, she decided, is like the defrost option on a car's heater that miraculously unfogs the windshield, allowing you to see where you're headed. — Richard Russo

Richard Russo Quotes 703665

[My] explanation makes such immediate sense that I can give it up only reluctantly, a necessary concession to my physician's expertise. This is the way my students feel, I realize, when I suggest stylistic revisions. They like the sentence the way they wrote it. They defer to my greater knowledge and experience because they must, but they still like the way the original sentence sounded when it had a dangling modifier, and they secretly suspect that my judgment, while generally sound, may be flawed in this instance. And they're a little miffed at my insistence ... — Richard Russo

Richard Russo Quotes 684245

Were it not for Occam's Razor, which always demands simplicity, I'd be tempted to believe that human beings are more influenced by distant causes than immediate ones. This would especially be true of overeducated people, who are capable of thinking past the immediate, of becoming obsessed by the remote. It's the old stuff, the conflicts we've never come to terms with, that sneaks up on us, half forgotten, insisting upon action. — Richard Russo

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Where was the middle ground between a sense of adventure and just plain sense? — Richard Russo