Top 82 Richard Yates Quotes
#1. It always seemed to me," she said at last, "that it must require a great deal of courage to be an artist, if only because the creative process is such a lonely one. I should imagine it must be all the more difficult for a woman.
Richard Yates
#2. 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
#3. You're painfully alive in a drugged and dying culture.
Richard Yates
#4. With their mother lying in a coma twenty miles away, they clung together drunkenly and wept for the loss of their father.
Richard Yates
#5. 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
#6. God knows there certainly ought to be a window around here somewhere, for all of us.
Richard Yates
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. Not the prettiest girl in the world, maybe, but cute and quick and fun to have around.
Richard Yates
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. she had always been ready to take off the minute she happened to feel like it ("Don't talk to me that way, Frank, or I'm leaving. I mean it") or the minute anything went wrong.
Richard Yates
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. Oh, you'll what? You'll leave me? What's that supposed to be - a threat or a promise?
Richard Yates
#18. 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
#19. Are artists and writers the only people entitled to lives of their own?
Richard Yates
#20. Remember what Anatole France said about the dog masturbating on your leg
'Sure, it's honest, but who needs it?
Richard Yates
#21. They knew what forgiveness was; they were willing to take him for better or worse; they loved him.
Richard Yates
#22. 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
#23. A man could rant and smash and grapple with the State Police, and still the sprinklers whirled at dusk on every lawn and the television droned in every living room.
Richard Yates
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. If you lived like a proletarian long enough, among proletarians, weren't you almost certain to become a proletarian too?
Richard Yates
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. Everything is selling. Nothing happens in this world, nothing comes into this world, until somebody makes a sale.
Richard Yates
#33. Anybody's marriage might benefit from an occasional embargo on talk.
Richard Yates
#34. Nobody thinks or feels or cares any more; nobody gets excited or believes in anything expect their own comfortable God damn mediocrity.
Richard Yates
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. Being alone has nothing to do with how many people are around.
Richard Yates
#38. Dying for love might be pitiable, but it wasn't much different, finally, from any other kind of dying.
Richard Yates
#39. 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
#40. Never say anything that doesn't improve on silence.
Richard Yates
#41. If you haven't written a novel by the time you're forty you never will!
Richard Yates
#42. 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
#45. Hard work, is the best medicine yet devised for all the ills of man- and of woman.
Richard Yates
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. Every man has a right to keep his own sentiments if he pleases.
Richard Yates
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. Some things you did were worth regretting; others not.
Richard Yates
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. They think the way to be a poet is to wear funny clothes and write sideways on the page.
Richard Yates
#55. Know what we did, Lucy? You and me? We spent our whole lives yearning. Isn't that the God damndest thing?
Richard Yates
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. People did change, and a change could be a bloom as well as a withering ...
Richard Yates
#59. 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
#60. There's never been anything funny about a woman dying for love.
Richard Yates
#61. His job was the very least important part of his life, never to be mentioned except in irony.
Richard Yates
#62. No one forgets the truth; they just get better at lying.
Richard Yates
#63. Why couldn't she stop talking? Did all lonely people have that problem?
Richard Yates
#64. 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
#65. The hell with "love" anyway, and with every other phony, time-wasting, half-assed emotion in the world.
Richard Yates
#66. How could you ever learn to trust the things you made up?
Richard Yates
#67. 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
#68. I'm only interested in stories that are about the crushing of the human heart.
Richard Yates
#69. 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
#70. Oh-h-h-h - Hidey, tidey, Christ Almighty Who the hell are we? Flim, flam, God damn We're the infantry ...
Richard Yates
#71. 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
#72. He couldn't even tell whether he was angry or contrite, whether it was forgiveness he wanted or the power to forgive.
Richard Yates
#73. It reminded her too, time and again, of her own susceptibility to panic and her unfathomable dread of being alone.
Richard Yates
#74. She bought a chocolate bar and it tasted surprisingly good - as if, without her knowing it, sitting here and eating this chocolate was the one thing she had wanted to do all day.
Richard Yates
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. Time and again they read the promise of failure in each other's eyes
Richard Yates
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. If you don't try at anything, you can't fail ... it takes back bone to lead the life you want
Richard Yates
#81. 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
#82. In avoiding specific goals he had avoided specific limitations. For the time being the world, life itself, could be his chosen field.
Richard Yates
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
