Richard Yates Quotes
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Hard work, is the best medicine yet devised for all the ills of man- and of woman.
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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.
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The hell with "love" anyway, and with every other phony, time-wasting, half-assed emotion in the world.
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if you don’t try at anything, you can’t fail… it takes back bone to lead the life you want
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Hopeless emptiness. Now you've said it. Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.
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He couldn't even tell whether he was angry or contrite, whether it was forgiveness he wanted or the power to forgive.
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In avoiding specific goals he had avoided specific limitations. For the time being the world, life itself, could be his chosen field.
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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?
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Every man has a right to keep his own sentiments if he pleases.
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He had won but he didn't feel like a winner.
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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 were saying "I'm sorry, of course you're right", and "Whatever you think is best", and "you're the most wonderful and valuable thing int he world", and the next thing you knew all honesty, all truth, was as far away and glimmering, as hopelessly unattainable as the world of the golden people.
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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?
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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
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if you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone.
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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.
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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.
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God knows there certainly ought to be a window around here somewhere, for all of us.
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...his job was the very least important part of his life, never to be mentioned except in irony.
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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.
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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.
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Dying for love might be pitiable, but it wasn't much different, finally, from any other kind of dying.
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There's never been anything funny about a woman dying for love.
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I'm only interested in stories that are about the crushing of the human heart.
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Being alone has nothing to do with how many people are around.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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And do you know a funny thing? I'm almost fifty years old and I've never understood anything in my whole life.
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People did change, and a change could be a bloom as well as a withering.
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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.
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