Robert James Waller Quotes & Sayings

Francesca was feeling good feelings, old feelings, poetry and music feelings. — Robert James Waller

No secrets, no mystery. no mystery, no life worth rememberin'. no life worth rememberin', no life worth goin' on. — Robert James Waller

Francesca said nothing, wondering about a man to whom the difference between a pasture and a meadow seemed important, who got excited about sky color, who wrote a little poetry but not much fiction. Who played the guitar, who earned his living by images and carried his tools in knapsacks. Who seemed like the wind. And moved like it. Came from it, perhaps. — Robert James Waller

The curse of modern times is the preponderance of male hormones in places where they can do long-term damage. Even if were not talking about wars between nations or assaults on nature, there's still that aggressiveness that keeps us apart from each other and the problems we need to be working on. — Robert James Waller

We're giving up free range, getting organized, feathering our emotions. Efficiency an effectiveness and all those other pieces of intellectual artifice. And with the loss of free range, the cowboy disappears, along with the mountain lion and gray wolf. There's not much room left for travelers. — Robert James Waller

The reality is not exactly what the song started out to be, but it's not a bad song. — Robert James Waller

... on being somewhat antisocial-
"You have less people at your funeral but you get more reading time. — Robert James Waller

This kind of certainty comes but just once in a lifetime! — Robert James Waller

If only we lost our minds and arrived at our hearts — Robert James Waller

Analysis destroys wholes. Some things, magic things, are meant to stay whole. If you look at their pieces, they go away. — Robert James Waller

People mistake shyness and reclusiveness- both of those- for arrogance. It's a convenient label slapped on by those who see only the surface of things and nothing more. — Robert James Waller

I sometimes have the feeling you've been here a long time, more than one lifetime, and that you've dwelt in private places none of the rest of us has even dreamed about. — Robert James Waller

Give me all of you, and I'll give you back yourself when we have finished.
And in the high country she had screamed aloud in some combination of fear and pleasure. And she had done that once more in a bed in Iowa, then turned the scream into a dwindling, involuntary cry for all the things she had once felt and now felt again with another strange man who lived in his own far places. — Robert James Waller

We're all getting lashed to the great wheel of uniformity. — Robert James Waller

The market kills more artistic passion than anything else. — Robert James Waller

The old dreams were good dreams; the didn't work out, but I'm glad I had them. — Robert James Waller

For we have come by different ways to this place ... I can tell by the natural ease with which you wear fine clothes and the way your mouth moves when you speak with waiters in good restaurants. You have come the way of castles and cathedrals, of elegance and empire. — Robert James Waller

And in that moment, everything I knew to be true about myself up until then was gone. I was acting like another woman, yet I was more myself than ever before. — Robert James Waller

Talisman, Talisman, show me your secrets,
Helmsman, Helmsman, turn me for home. — Robert James Waller

Maudlin makes it difficult to enter the realm of gentleness — Robert James Waller

Life is never easy for those who dream. — Robert James Waller

In a way, women were asking for men to be poets and driving, passionate lovers at the same time. — Robert James Waller

His eyes looked directly at her, and she felt something jump inside. The eyes, the voice, the face, the silver hair, the easy way he moved his body, old ways, disturbing ways, ways that draw you in. Ways that whisper to you in the final moment before sleep comes, when the barriers have fallen. — Robert James Waller

It already smells good," he said, pointing toward the stove. "It smells ... quiet." He looked at her.
"Quiet? Could something smell quiet" She was thinking about the phrase, asking herself. He was right. After the pork chops and steaks and roasts she cooked for the family, this was quiet cooking. No violence involved anywhere down the food chain, except maybe for pulling up the vegetables. The stew cooked quietly and smelled quiet. — Robert James Waller

So here I am walking around with another person inside of me. Though I think I put it better the day we parted when I said there is a third person we have created from the two of us. And I am stalked now by that other entity. — Robert James Waller

The old dreams were good dreams; they didn't work out but I'm glad I had them. — Robert James Waller

This is why I'm here on this planet, at this time, Francesca. Not to travel or make pictures, but to love you. I know that now. I have been falling from the rim of a great, high place, somewhere back in time, for many more years than I have lived in this life. And through all of those years, I have been falling toward you. — Robert James Waller

Anyone who can feel that way about a woman is worth lovin himself. — Robert James Waller

The human heart has a way of making itself large again even after it's been broken into a million pieces. — Robert James Waller

One great love in a single lifetime was enough for anyone. — Robert James Waller

It's kind of strange- in fiction you get to tell lies and are applauded for it. — Robert James Waller

We have both lost ourselves and created something else, something that exists only as an interlacing of the two of us. — Robert James Waller

Complex things are easy to do. Simplicity's the real challenge. — Robert James Waller

In a universe of ambiguity, this kind of certainty comes only once, and never again, no matter how many lifetimes you live. — Robert James Waller

I am the highway and a peregrine and all the sails that ever went to sea — Robert James Waller

It's clear to me now that I have been moving toward you and you toward me for a long time. Though neither of us was aware of the other before we met, there was a kind of mindless certainty bumming blithely along beneath our ignorance that ensured we would come together. Like two solitary birds flying the great prairies by celestial reckoning, all of these years and lifetimes we have been moving toward one another. — Robert James Waller

First you must have the images, then come the words. — Robert James Waller

And I remember most of what I know that is good and true and lasting has come not from scholars but from minstrels and gypsies ... — Robert James Waller

Maybe now and then if it's absolutely necessary to cushion someone from a world gone too harsh and bitter. — Robert James Waller

Custom brings predictability, and predictability carries its own comforts. — Robert James Waller

I don't like feeling sorry for myself. That's not who I am. And most of the time I don't feel that way. Instead, I am grateful for having at least found you. We could have flashed by one another like two pieces of cosmic dust.
God or the universe or whatever one chooses to label the great systems of balance and order does not recognize Earth-time. To the universe, four days is no different than four billion light years. I try to keep that in mind.
But, I am, after all, a man. And all the philosophic rationalizations I can conjure up do not keep me from wanting you, every day, every moment, the merciless wail of time, of time I can never spend with you, deep within my head.
I love you, profoundly and completely. And I always will.
The last cowboy,
Robert — Robert James Waller

Robert, there's a creature inside of you that I'm not good enough to bring out, not strong enough to reach. I sometimes have the feeling you've been here a long time, more than one lifetime, and that you've dwelt in private places none of the rest of us has even dreamed about. You frighten me, even though you're gentle with me. If I didn't fight to control myself with you, I feel like I might lose my center and never get back. — Robert James Waller

She was more of a business partner to him than anything else. Some of her appreciated that. But rustling yet within her was another person who wanted to bathe and perfume herself ... and be taken, carried away, and peeled back by a force she could sense, but never articulate, even dimly within her mind. — Robert James Waller

As much as I want you and want to be with you and part of you, I can't tear myself away from the realness of my responsibilities. If you force me, physically or mentally, to go with you, as I said earlier, I cannot fight that. I don't have the strength, given my feelings for you. In spite of what I said about not taking the road away from you, I'd go because of my own selfish wanting of you. But please don't make me. Don't make me give this up, my responsibilities. I cannot do that and live with the thought of it. If I did leave now, those thoughts would turn me into something other than the woman you have come to love — Robert James Waller

And, man he cried when he talked. He cried big tears, the kind it takes an old man to cry, the kind it takes a saxophone to play. — Robert James Waller

Once a person knows a kiss and a kind word, you can't blame him for never wanting to live without them again. — Robert James Waller

Sometime I'm going to do an essay called 'The Virtues of Amateurism' for all of those people who wish they earned their living in the arts. The market kills more artistic people than anything else. It's a world of safety out there, for most people. They want safety, the magazines and manufacturers give them safety, give them homogeneity, give them the familiar and comfortable, don't challenge them. — Robert James Waller

Carlisle wondered if it was still possible for him to live alongside civilization and yet be somewhat apart from it. Find a slice of quiet in the layers of noise, conduct a rain into the noise now and then for some work, take the gold and run like hell back to the quiet place....Flight was no good. You couldn't escape it, whatever 'it' was. — Robert James Waller

Remember the great adversity of art or anything else is a hurried life. — Robert James Waller

The marketing people are always talking about something called 'consumers'. I have this image of a fat little man in baggy Bermuda shorts, a Hawaiian shirt, and a straw hat with beer-can openers dangling from it, clutching fistfuls of dollars. — Robert James Waller

Realities that kept the music silent, the dreams in a box. — Robert James Waller

Something I've never been able to adapt to, to understand is how they can lavish such love and care on the animals and then see them sold for slaughter. I don't dare say anything about it, though. Richard and his friends would be down on me in a flash. But there's some kind of cold, unfeeling contradiction in that business. — Robert James Waller

The heart never forgets, never gives up, the territory marked off for those who came before. — Robert James Waller

The overriding problem with our country, and our world in general, is that we are, in large part, managed by incompetents. Most of these are men who have spent their lives seeking power rather than themselves. — Robert James Waller

An inherent kindness exists in the process of aging ... we are allowed to move along gradually. — Robert James Waller

You make pictures, not take them?
Yes. At least that's how I think of it. That's the difference between Sunday snapshooters and someone who does it for a living ... I don't just take things as given, I try to make them into something that reflects my personal consciousness, my spirit. I try to find the poetry in the image. — Robert James Waller

I don't just take things as given, I try to make them into something that reflects my personal consciousness, my spirit. — Robert James Waller

Gypsies make difficult friends for ordinary people, and he was seething of a gypsy. — Robert James Waller

The curse of modern times is the propensity of male hormones in places where they can do the most damage — Robert James Waller

She wore ribbons in her black hair and clung to her dreams — Robert James Waller

There are songs that come free from the blue-eyed grass, from the dust of a thousand country roads. This is one of them. — Robert James Waller

The road is a strange place. Shuffling along, I looked up and you were there walking across the grass toward my truck on an August day. In retrospect, it seems inevitable - it could not have been any other way
a case of what I call the high probability of the improbable — Robert James Waller

When a woman makes the choice to marry, to have children, in one way her life begins but in another way it stops. You build a life of details. You become a mother, a wife and you stop and stay steady so that your children can move. And when they leave they take your life of details with them. And then you're expected to move again only you don't remember what moves you because no one has asked in so long. Not even yourself. — Robert James Waller

He was an animal. A graceful, hard, male animal who did nothing overtly to dominate her yet dominated her completely, in the exact way she wanted that to happen at this moment. — Robert James Waller

I made that horn sound like it never had before; I made it cry for all the miles and years that separated them. — Robert James Waller

If there's no need to climb, then there's no reason to learn how to climb. — Robert James Waller

Such physical matters were nice, yet, to him, intelligence and passion born of living, the ability to move and be moved by subtleties of the mind and spirit, were what really counted. — Robert James Waller

Neither of them spoke, they simply stood there, sending, receiving, imprinting the feel of each on the other, indelibly. — Robert James Waller

He liked words and images. "Blue" was one of his favorite words. He liked the feeling it made on his lips and tongue when he said it. — Robert James Waller