Richard Ford

What's friendship's realest measure?I'll tell you. The amount of precious time you'll squander on someone else's calamities and fuck-ups.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

The saved moment is the true art of love.

The question __hy poetry?_ isn__ asking what makes poetry unique among art forms; poetry may indeed share its origins with other forms of privileged utterance. A somewhat more interesting question would be: __hat is the nature of experience, and especially the experience of using language, that calls poetic utterance into existence? What is there about experience that__ unutterable?_ You can__ generalize very usefully about poetry; you can__ reduce its nature down to a kernel that underlies all its various incarnations. I guess my internal conversation suggests that if you can__ successfully answer the question of __hy poetry?,_ can__ reduce it in the way I think you can__, then maybe that__ the strongest evidence that poetry__ doing its job; it__ creating an essential need and then satisfying it.

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

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.

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.

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

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__ike 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.

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.

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

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.

If loneliness is the disease, the story is the cure.