Famous Quotes & Sayings

Richard Yates Quotes & Sayings

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

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Famous Quotes By Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 2203141

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

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He let the fingers of one hand splay out across the pocket of his shirt to show what a simple, physical thing the heart was; then he made the same hand into a fist. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 267714

They say that we are better educated than our parents' generation. What they mean is that we go to school longer. It is not the same thing. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 1716478

They knew what forgiveness was; they were willing to take him for better or worse; they loved him. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 1800733

He turned off all the hot water and turned up the cold, a thing he hadn't done in years. The shock of it sent him dancing and gasping but he made himself stay under it until he'd counted to thirty, the way he used to do in the army, and he came out feeling like a million dollars. Tell her? Why, of course he wasn't going to tell her. What the hell would be the point of that? — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 619810

He's been living on the fringes of art for so many years, talking and talking about it, that he's come to expect all the prerogatives of being an artist without ever doing the work. I mean he's an art bum ... — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 1775473

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 of the time just before sleeping, the act of falling asleep itself, the perilous twilight of semi-awareness when the mind must struggle for coherence, when a siren or a cry in the street is the very sound of terror and the ticking of the clock is a steady reminder of death. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 2064496

I don't think about growing old," she said.
"I know you don't. That's one of the things I admire about you, Alice. You have some kind of boundless faith in the future. You never give up."
"I suppose I'm an optimist. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 1617538

It had been easy to decide in favor of love on Bethune Street, in favor of walking proud and naked on the grass rug of an apartment that caught the morning sun among its makeshift chairs, its French travel posters and its bookcase made of packing-crate slats - an apartment where half the fun of having an affair was that it was just like being married, and where later, after a trip to City Hall and back, after a ceremonial collecting of the other two keys from the other two men, half the fun of being married was that it was just like having an affair. She'd decided in favor of that, all right. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 944300

Wasn't it true, then, that everything in his life from that point on had been a succession of things he hadn't really wanted to do? Taking a hopelessly dull job to prove he could be as responsible as any other family man, moving to an overpriced, genteel apartment to prove his mature belief in the fundamentals of orderliness and good health, having another child to prove that the first one hadn't been a mistake, buying a house in the country because that was the next logical step and he had to prove himself capable of taking it. Proving, proving; and for no other reason than that he was married to a woman who had somehow managed to put him forever on the defensive, who loved him when he was nice, who lived according to what she happened to feel like doing and who might at any time - this was the hell of it - who might at any time of day or night just happen to feel like leaving him.
It was as ludicrous and as simple as that. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 2013248

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 thing that struck him was that she was beautiful. She had lost too much weight - her long legs were too thin in greasy jeans and her upper body looked as frail as a bird's under a greasy workman's shirt - but her pale and famished face, with its great blue eyes and delicate, thin-lipped mouth, made her look like the heartbreaking debutante her mother might always have wanted her to be. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 1783808

Warren Cox, God knew, was no prize; a commercial person, a sales person, the kind of man who said things like "x numbers of dollars". At lunch today, laboriously trying to explain some business procedure, he had said "x number of dollars" three times. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 1801820

Remember what Anatole France said about the dog masturbating on your leg
'Sure, it's honest, but who needs it? — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 1108122

Every man has a right to keep his own sentiments if he pleases. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 610410

As an intense, nicotine-stained, Jean-Paul Sartre sort of man, wasn't it simple logic to expect that he'd be limited to intense, nicotine-stained Jean-Paul Sartre sorts of Women? — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 164577

He couldn't even tell whether he was angry or contrite, whether it was forgiveness he wanted or the power to forgive. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 1083714

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 a terrible sickly dependence on each other's weakness- that's why. That's why I couldn't stop laughing about the Inability to Love, and that's why I can't stand to let you touch me, and that's why I'll never again believe in anything you think, let alone anything you say — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 1832036

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 and no gaunt silhouettes. It was invincibly cheerful, a toyland of white and pastel houses whose bright, uncurtained windows winked blandly through a dappling of green and yellow leaves ... A man running down these streets in desperate grief was indecently out of place. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 774091

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. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 1912356

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 have a job you don't like. Great. This is the way ninety-eight-point-nine per cent of the people work things out, so believe me, buddy, you've got nothing to apologize for. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 1591962

Because he was closer to her here than in the office, and less shy than in the car, he could see clearly now what he'd only been able to guess at before: the texture of her skin was what had made him want to pull off her clothes the moment he'd seen her. It was like the surface of a flawless apricot or nectarine; it glowed; it needed to be taken and eaten. A small edge of white lace could be glimpsed just inside the V-neck of her dress, moving with each breath and quivering when she laughed, and that frivolous, unconscious touch of flirtation made him heavy with lust. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 1531964

Oh-h-h-h - Hidey, tidey, Christ Almighty Who the hell are we? Flim, flam, God damn We're the infantry ... — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 1644732

If you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 1327541

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 driveway in the crumpled old Ford. And riding to work, one of the youngest and healthiest passengers on the train, he sat with the look of a man condemned to a very slow, painless death. He felt middle-aged. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 1526926

They think the way to be a poet is to wear funny clothes and write sideways on the page. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 1516957

Hard work, is the best medicine yet devised for all the ills of man- and of woman. — Richard Yates

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Never say anything that doesn't improve on silence. — Richard Yates

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And you know what else I used to love? I loved to watch you get into your car and drive away - just because it meant you knew exactly what you were doing, and because you always did it so well. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 1430682

The whole point of crying was to quit before you cornied it up. The whole point of grief itself was to cut it out while it was still honest, while it still meant something. Because the thing was so easily corrupted, let yourself go and you started embellishing your own sobs. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 1429949

I want to retain my own identity. Therefore the thing I'm most anxious to avoid is any kind of work that can be considered 'interesting' in its own right. I want something that can't possibly touch me. I want some big, swollen corporation that's been bumbling along making money in its sleep for a hundred years, where they have to hire eight guys for every one job because none of them can be expected to care about whatever boring thing it is that they are supposed to be doing. I want to go into that kind of place and say, Look. You can have my body and my nice college-boy smile for so many hours a day, in exchange for so many dollars, and beyond that we'll leave each other strictly alone. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 1667160

You're painfully alive in a drugged and dying culture. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 1682443

Not the prettiest girl in the world, maybe, but cute and quick and fun to have around. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 1704529

Being alone has nothing to do with how many people are around. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 1360124

She just happened to feel like it. Wasn't that after all, the only reason there was? Had she ever had a less selfish, more complicated reason for doing anything in her life? — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 1228751

How could you ever learn to trust the things you made up? — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 1978094

People did change, and a change could be a bloom as well as a withering ... — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 2269135

How small and neat and comically serious the other men looked, with their grey-flecked crew cuts and their button-down collars and their brisk little hurrying feet! There were endless desperate swarms of them, hurrying through the station and the streets, and an hour from now they would all be still. The waiting mid-town office buildings would swallow them up and contain them, so that to stand in one tower looking out across the canyon to another would be to inspect a great silent insectarium displaying hundreds of tiny pink men in white shirts, forever shifting papers and frowning into telephones, acting out their passionate little dumb show under the supreme indifference of the rolling spring clouds. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 2248602

Hopeless emptiness. Now you've said it. Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 2128847

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 it would take to blow you up. You are an empty, empty, hollow shell of a woman. I mean, what the hell are you doing in my house if you hate me so much? Why the hell are you married to me? What the hell are you doing carrying my child? I mean, why didn't you just get rid of it when you had the chance? Because listen to me, listen to me, I got news for you - I wish to God that you had! — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 2124595

It depressed him to consider how much energy he had wasted, over the years, in the self-denying posture of apology. From now on, whatever else his life might hold, there would be no more apologies. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 2074171

Nothing had warned him that he might be overwhelmed by the swaying, shining vision of a girl he hadn't seen in years, a girl whose every glance and gesture could make his throat fill up with longing ("Wouldn't you like to be loved by me?"), and that then before his very eyes she would dissolve and change into the graceless, suffering creature whose existence he tried every day of his life to deny but whom he knew as well and as painfully as he knew himself, a gaunt constricted woman whose red eyes flashed reproach, whose false smile in the curtain call was as homely as his own sore feet, his own damp climbing underwear and his own sour smell. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 2024442

Wish I didn't have to go to work tomorrow", he said.
"Don't, then. Stay home."
"No. I guess I've got to go. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 2017200

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 mediocrity. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 1997304

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 two tiny pointers into jeweled alignment while tons of heavy artillery go fluttering overhead: the prosaic, civilian-looking dial of the watch has restored, however briefly, an illusion of personal control. Good, it counsels, looking tidily up from the hairs and veins of each terribly vulnerable wrist; fine: so far, everything's happening right on time. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 1990805

And Emily had yet to shed a single tear. It troubled her all the way back to the city, and she rode with one hand sandwiched between her cheek and the cool, shuddering glass of the limousine window, as if that might help. She tried whispering 'Daddy' to herself, tried closing her eyes and picturing his face, but it didn't work. Then she thought of something that made her throat close up: she might never have been her father's baby, but he had always called her 'little rabbit.' And she was crying easily now, causing her mother to reach over and squeeze her hand; the only trouble was that she couldn't be sure whether she cried for her father or for Warren Maddock, or Maddox, who was back in South Carolina now being shipped out to a division.
But she stopped crying abruptly when she realized that even that was a lie: these tears, as always before in her life, were wholly for herself - for poor, sensitive Emily Grimes whom nobody understood, and who understood nothing. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 1720094

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 haggard look. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 1905946

Everything is selling. Nothing happens in this world, nothing comes into this world, until somebody makes a sale. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 1895797

God knows there certainly ought to be a window around here somewhere, for all of us. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 1886086

If you don't try at anything, you can't fail ... it takes back bone to lead the life you want — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 1818778

All her life, from the time she was eight or nine years old, Gloria had relied on a neat, nearly automatic little trick of her mind for adjusting to minor disappointments. When you opened the bright wrappings of some meager or poorly chosen gift, you simply let your mind tell you it was just what you wanted; that way you could always make the right response, and you could even believe it. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 1771300

The place had filled him with a sense of wisdom hovering just out of reach, of unspeakable grace prepared and waiting just around the corner, but he'd walked himself weak down its endless blue streets and all the people who knew how to live had kept their tantalizing secret to themselves. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 1767587

Rachel was a girl who depended on small, recurrent rituals - that was one of the things he'd come to know about her, and his very ability to identify so specific a trait made him proud of his own capacity for tenderness. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 1760431

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 and deadly dull homes in the suburbs. Economic circumstances might force you to live in this environment, but the important thing was to keep from being contaminated. The important thing, always, was to remember who you were. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 1739855

Whoever said you can't love ridiculous things? God knows i love you, and you're the most ridiculous woman I ever met! — Richard Yates

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And they fell asleep like children. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 547085

He was happy enough to stay in this jumbled, lively place where the drinks were cheap and the band was loud and he could feel the inner peace that comes from knowing that all your clothes are new and perfectly fitted. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 527575

The subjects of her talk didn't matter; he knew what she was really saying. Helpless and gentle, small and tired and anxious to please, she was asking him to agree that her life was not a failure. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 502578

Then the fight went out of control. It quivered their arms and legs and wrenched their faces into shapes of hatred, it urged them harder and deeper into each other's weakest points, showing them cunning ways around each other's strongholds and quick chances to switch tactics, feint, and strike again. In the space of a gasp for breath it sent their memories racing back over the years for old weapons to rip the scabs off old wounds; it went on and on. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 479233

In avoiding specific goals he had avoided specific limitations. For the time being the world, life itself, could be his chosen field. — Richard Yates

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No one forgets the truth; they just get better at lying. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 450553

Nobody thinks or feels or cares any more; nobody gets excited or believes in anything expect their own comfortable God damn mediocrity. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 447217

The movies were wonderful because they took you out of yourself, and at the same time they gave you a sense of being whole. Things of the world might serve to remind you at every turn that your life was snarled and perilously incomplete, that terror would never be far from possession of your heart, but those perceptions would nearly always vanish, if only for a little while, in the cool and nicely scented darkness of any movie house, anywhere. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 393364

Then he was gone, and Prentice was alone in a silence that rang with all his shrill, unspoken words. He was so alone that the only thing to do was lie back on the bed and roll over and draw up his knees like an unborn baby, staring with dry eyes at a cluster of pink flowers on the wallpaper, knowing he had never been so alone in his life. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 391437

If you haven't written a novel by the time you're forty you never will! — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 351733

It reminded her too, time and again, of her own susceptibility to panic and her unfathomable dread of being alone. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 351354

She quickly took a drink to hide her mouth. That mannerism had never changed: whenever Sarah was embarrassed, after she'd told a joke and was waiting for the laughter, or when she was afraid she'd talked too much, she would go for her mouth as if to cover nakedness - with Cokes or popsicles as a child, with drinks or cigarettes now. Maybe all the years of splayed, protruding teeth, and then of braces, had made her mouth the most vulnerable part of her for life. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 580091

Now you've said it. The hopeless emptiness. Hell, plenty of people are on to the emptiness part; out where I used to work, on the Coast, that's all we ever talked about. We'd sit around talking about emptiness all night. Nobody ever said 'hopeless,' though; that's where we'd chicken out. Because maybe it does take a certain amount of guts to see the emptiness, but it takes a whole hell of a lot more to see the hopelessness. And I guess when you do see the hopelessness, that's when there's nothing to do but take off. If you can — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 280333

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 of your life, but that didn't mean there'd be any way to keep from knowing it was there. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 264175

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 his sobs a little, exaggerating their depth with unnecessary shudders.
...
The whole point of crying is to quit before you coined it up. The whole point of grief itself was to cut it out while it was still honest, while it still meant something. Because the thing was so easily corrupted — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 261651

I don't care if it takes you five years of doing nothing at all; I don't care if you decide after five years that what you really want is to be a bricklayer or a mechanic or a merchant seaman. 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 stifled here. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 218490

He watched her with murderous distaste as she fumbled with her spoon. They had ordered ice cream, and some of it clung to her lips as she rolled a cold mouthful on her tongue. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 212141

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 ... and then you were face to face, in total darkness, with the knowledge that you didn't know who you were. And how could anyone else be blamed for that? — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 200734

Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life, and looking back it always seemed that the trouble began with their parents' divorce. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 192735

If you lived like a proletarian long enough, among proletarians, weren't you almost certain to become a proletarian too? — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 136005

The hell with "love" anyway, and with every other phony, time-wasting, half-assed emotion in the world. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 132441

Oh, you'll what? You'll leave me? What's that supposed to be - a threat or a promise? — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 130447

Some things you did were worth regretting; others not. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 947024

And maybe things like this really did get better of their own accord, if you gave them time; maybe all you could ever do, beyond suffering, was wait and see what might be going to happen next. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 1275955

As a writer, I like the list of "things to strive for" that Richard Yates kept above his typewriter:
genuine clarity
genuine feeling
the right word
the exact English sentence
the eloquent detail
the rigorous dramatization of story — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 1265540

Almost time to go home - and he had come to rely on the desolate wastes of time that lay between these pleasures as an invalid comes to rely on the certainty of recurring pain. It was a part of him. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 1248775

Know what we did, Lucy? You and me? We spent our whole lives yearning. Isn't that the God damndest thing? — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 130234

Sometimes I can feel as if I were sparkling all over," she was saying, "and I want to go out and do something that's absolutely crazy, and marvelous ... — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 1158914

He was big and sturdy, with a heavy jaw and a voice that made her want to curl up and ride in his pocket like a kitten. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 1155801

I see,' she said. And when would she ever learn to stop saying 'I see' about things she didn't see at all? — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 1080183

With their mother lying in a coma twenty miles away, they clung together drunkenly and wept for the loss of their father. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 1069572

Emily knew she was going to cry. She tried to avert it with a childhood trick that had sometimes worked before - pressing both thumbnails hard into the tender flesh beneath the nails of her index fingers, so that the self-inflicted pain might be greater than the ache of her swelling throat - but it was no use. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 1045976

Rachel became slowly aware now, even while talking and listening to her own voice, that there might well be something universal about the pleasure a grown girl could take in disparaging her mother. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 993802

I still had this idea that there was a whole world of marvelous golden people somewhere, as far ahead of me as the seniors at Rye when I was in the sixth grade; people who knew everything instinctively, who made their lives work out the way they wanted without even trying, who never had to make the best of a bad job because it never occured to them to do anything less then perfectly the first time. Sort of heroic super-people, all of them beautiful and witty and calm and kind, and I always imagined that when I did find them I'd suddenly know that I Belonged among them, that I was one of them, that I'd been meant to be one of them all along, and everything in teh meantime had been a mistake; and they'd know it too. I'd be like the ugly duckling among the swans. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 951854

His job was the very least important part of his life, never to be mentioned except in irony. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 1285813

Are artists and writers the only people entitled to lives of their own? — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 902822

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 to resign from real life and 'settle down' when they have families. — Richard Yates

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She had found in the past that a voluptuously long, hot shower cold be made to seem almost as health-giving as a night's sleep; she had learned too that taking exquisite pains over the selection and putting-on of clothes could sometimes be as good a way as any of helping the hours to pass. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 790191

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 be allowed to stay the same? — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 779361

The only trouble at first was that one small, cold-sober part of her mind floated free of the rest of her; it was able to observe how solemn a man could be at times like this, how earnest in his hairy nakedness, and how predictable. You had only to offer up your breasts and there was his hungering mouth on one and then the other of them, drawing the nipples out hard; you had only to open your legs and there was his hand at work on you, tirelessly burrowing. Then you got his mouth again, and then you got the whole of him, boyishly proud of his first penetration, lunging and thrusting and ready to love you forever, if only to prove that he could. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 694147

Time and again they read the promise of failure in each other's eyes — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 690736

When you wrote it didn't matter if hysteria sometimes came up in your face and voice (unless, of course, you let it find its way into your "literary voice") because writing was done in merciful privacy and silence. Even if you were partly out of your mind it might turn out to be all right: you could try for control even harder than Blanche Dubois was said to have tried, and with luck you could still bring off a sense of order and sanity on the page for the reader. Reading, after all, was a thing done in privacy and silence too. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 684376

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 one later; and that one; and that one; so that the alert, front part of his mind could remain free enough to keep him in command of the situation. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 661803

I seem to have to lost confidence in just about everything else. I've come to believe that only a very, very few matters in the world can ever be trusted to make sense. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes 619884

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

Richard Yates Quotes 590667

For a year she found an exquisite pain - almost pleasure - in facing the world as if she didn't care. Look at me, she would say to herself in the middle of a trying day. Look at me: I'm surviving; I'm coping; I'm in control of all this. — Richard Yates