Richardson Quotes

One cat just leads to another." [Letter from Finca Vigia, Cuba, to his first wife, Elizabeth Hadley Richardson (1943).]

Hurt shouldn’t pile up like this inside of someone. No one should suffocate beneath pain on top of pain. You should have time to breathe, time to scream it out until it doesn’t exist anymore.

A man can see a hundred women, lust for a thousand more, but it is one scent that will open his eyes and turn him to love.

I know not my own heart if it be not absolutely free.

Big whirls have little whirls, That feed on their velocity; And little whirls have lesser whirls, And so on to viscosity.

You are everything good and straight and fine and true—and I see that so clearly now, in the way you’ve carried yourself and listened to your own heart. You’ve changed me more than you know, and will always be a part of everything I am. That’s one thing I’ve learned from this. No one you love is ever truly lost.

I don't mean to hate people, I just get forced into it.

God draws near to the brokenhearted. He leans toward those who are suffering. He knows what it feels like to be wounded and abandoned.

if you want to live an authentic, meaningful life, you need to master the art of disappointing and upsetting others, hurting feelings, and living with the reality that some people just won’t like you. It may not be easy, but it’s essential if you want your life to reflect your deepest desires, values, and needs.

On Writing: Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays 1. A beginning ends what an end begins. 2. The despair of the blank page: it is so full. 3. In the head Art’s not democratic. I wait a long time to be a writer good enough even for myself. 4. The best time is stolen time. 5. All work is the avoidance of harder work. 6. When I am trying to write I turn on music so I can hear what is keeping me from hearing. 7. I envy music for being beyond words. But then, every word is beyond music. 8. Why would we write if we’d already heard what we wanted to hear? 9. The poem in the quarterly is sure to fail within two lines: flaccid, rhythmless, hopelessly dutiful. But I read poets from strange languages with freedom and pleasure because I can believe in all that has been lost in translation. Though all works, all acts, all languages are already translation. 10. Writer: how books read each other. 11. Idolaters of the great need to believe that what they love cannot fail them, adorers of camp, kitsch, trash that they cannot fail what they love. 12. If I didn’t spend so much time writing, I’d know a lot more. But I wouldn’t know anything. 13. If you’re Larkin or Bishop, one book a decade is enough. If you’re not? More than enough. 14. Writing is like washing windows in the sun. With every attempt to perfect clarity you make a new smear. 15. There are silences harder to take back than words. 16. Opacity gives way. Transparency is the mystery. 17. I need a much greater vocabulary to talk to you than to talk to myself. 18. Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half is preventing people from reading what they expected you to mean. 19. Believe stupid praise, deserve stupid criticism. 20. Writing a book is like doing a huge jigsaw puzzle, unendurably slow at first, almost self-propelled at the end. Actually, it’s more like doing a puzzle from a box in which several puzzles have been mixed. Starting out, you can’t tell whether a piece belongs to the puzzle at hand, or one you’ve already done, or will do in ten years, or will never do. 21. Minds go from intuition to articulation to self-defense, which is what they die of. 22. The dead are still writing. Every morning, somewhere, is a line, a passage, a whole book you are sure wasn’t there yesterday. 23. To feel an end is to discover that there had been a beginning. A parenthesis closes that we hadn’t realized was open). 24. There, all along, was what you wanted to say. But this is not what you wanted, is it, to have said it?

I never understood why other people thought my color, any color, needed fixing.

Tired of myself longing for what I have not

I am tired of the position of the dried-up critic and doubter. The believer is the true full man. (from a biography of James by Robert D. Richardson)

I preferred to look at the sea, which said nothing and never made you feel alone.

Be sure don't let people's telling you, you are pretty, puff you up; for you did not make yourself, and so can have no praise due to you for it. It is virtue and goodness only, that make the true beauty.

Sophistication is upscale conformity.

Cecilia knew she could not go on wasting her days in the stews of her untidied room, lying on her bed in a haze of smoke, chin propped on her hand, pins and needles spreading up through her arm as she read her way through Richardson's Clarissa.

You have two kinds of secrets. The ones only you know. The ones only you don't.

Stream of consciousness is a muddle-headed phrase. It is not a stream, it’s a pool, a sea, an ocean.

People of little understanding are most apt to be angry when their sense is called into question.

If you love something, Let it go, If it comes back it's yours, That's how you know kno-o-ow Nonsense, Christina Aguilera! I say, 'If you love it, file it away under "Things I love". If it's required at a later date, you'll know exactly where it i-i-i-is.

At my age an hour's reading before bedtime is essential, and I wisely brought Pamela with me. If any of you has trouble sleeping, I will read aloud to you. I never yet knew anyone who could not fall asleep with Richardson being read aloud to him.

Surrealism, then, neither aims to subvert realism, as does the fantastic, nor does it try to transcend it. It looks for different means by which to explore reality itself.

I refuse to believe that clubbing is how people are supposed to meet to establish relationships on a level for beyond what we consider to be a norm in modern society.

There are moments in your life that can change you forever, and you Norah, you are my forever moment.

Elliot,” the President pleaded with him as the Attorney General entered, “Brezhnev wouldn’t understand if I didn’t fire Cox after all this.” Nixon urged Richardson to delay.

Being able to return to the books was a sanctuary for my heart. And a joy bolted free, lessening my own grievances, forgiving spent youth and dying dreams lost to a hard life, the hard land, and to folks’ hard thoughts and partialities.

The first thing was to get down to Addie Richardson's henhouse, and that was a goodish way, four or five miles. She found herself wondering if the Lord was going to send her an eagle to fly her those four miles, or send Elijah in his fiery chariot to give her a lift. Blasphemy," she told herself complacently. "The Lord provides strength, not taxicabs.

You! You are so lucky you're dead.

When I don't have something to worry about, I worry. Nothing comes so naturally to a human being as anxiety and worry.

I know very well that I have no reason to feel aggrieved - I am fully aware of how lucky I am, but knowing it and still being down makes me hate myself all the more.

After all, there was something rather pleasant in knowing that you were misunderstood. It made you feel different from everyone else.

Time is a created thing. To say I DON'T HAVE TIME is like saying I DON'T WANT TO DO IT.

You're not Forsaken. You're Chosen for Purpose.

By my soul, I can neither eat, drink, nor sleep; nor, what's still worse, love any woman in the world but her.

Once I ran out of excuses, I reclaimed my life. Now, I don't need excuses.

Novels and gardens," she says. "I like to move from plot to plot.

Asian men could be socially inept and incompetent and ridiculous, like a Long Duk Dong, or at best unthreatening and slightly buffoonish, like a Jackie Chan. They were not allowed to be angry and articulate and powerful. And possibly right, Mr. Richardson thought uneasily.

I know I had no right to do this to you, but if you ask me if I regret it, I will answer you no. If you ask me if I’d do it again, I’d say yes. I would do it again and again and again. There is a darkness in me that lives and breathes just like yours, except it’s motivated by love, and not by pain.

Are you at work?" I asked. Not precisely, but that's a good suggestion....

You grow readers, expand minds, if you let them choose, but you go banning a read, you stunt the whole community.

Contrary to what we've been told, life is simple. We complicate matters with our choices.

Bring me new words when we meet again so I know the book and brain ain’t gathering dust,

There is simply too much to be done for us all to go round 'enjoying ourselves.' When the world is perfect, then we can all sit down and eat jelly beans, but for now the fact that things are going well for you just means that you are in a position to alleviate someone else's suffering for a while.

There is nothing heavier than the burden of potential

You are not going to be the girl I’m going to marry are you? You are going to be the girl that got away.

I don’t need someone to complete me, I need someone to make things a little bit better every now and again.

Just because some people are fueled by drama doesn't mean you have to attend the performance.

Though she would never quite articulate it this way, resentment began to sheathe concern. ANGER IS FEAR'S BODYGUARD, a poster in the hospital hard read, but Mrs. Richardson had never noticed it; she was too busy thinking, It wasn't supposed to happen this way.

So . . . do I have to go punch Stone in the face, or just burp in Richardson’s class?” Caleb "Do what?" Nick “I’m trying to gauge how much detention I need to earn to match yours. Therefore I’m asking the severity of my grievance and who to assault for it.” Caleb

It's just sexual tension. Hardcore, animalistic, lick his body all over, sexual tension. - Norah

There are silences harder to take back than words.

I will be a Friend to you, and you shall take care of my Linen

Anyone who tells you that it is better to have loved and lost that to never loved at all has never done both.

Can’t be angry and smart at the same time. Now, nothing wrong in having the anger, but the two rarely work together.

Grandma laughed. “You’d be surprised. It’s awfully hard to dislike someone when you really pray for them. In fact the person you pray for could turn out to be one of your best friends.

At the Richardson house were overstuffed sofas so deep you could sink into them as if into a bubble bath. Credenzas. Heavy sleigh beds. Once you owned an enormous chair like this, Pearl thought, you would simply have to stay put. You would have to plant roots and make the place that held this chair your home.

Life listens to you, but do you speak to life?

Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half is preventing people from reading what they expected you to mean.

The most sensitive,the most delicate of instruments is the mind of a little child

Familiarity destroys reverence.

Well, them cloths are a lot like folks. Ain’t much difference at all. Some of us is more spiffed up than others, some stiffer, and still, some softer. There’s the colorful and dull, ugly and pretty, old, new ’uns. But in the end we’s all fabric, cut from His cloth. Fabric, and just that.

Laws about females never make a lick of sense because they’re made and run by men and meant to keep us in bondage.

You don’t ever have to apologize for feeling, Marlin. Life’s not worth living if we don’t feel intensely.

Who breaks the thread, the one who pulls, the one who holds on?

Your best teacher is the person offering you your greatest challenge.

My heart and my hand shall never be separated.

Democracies die more often through the ballot box than at gunpoint.

This is what happens when soul mates finally join as one. The stars align, the heavens sing, and everything else fades away. You know you’ll always have strength in your heart, and courage in your eyes.

I am in no doubt that if you use the term 'luv' in a letter or text message then you are incapable of truly understanding the emotion. Artists have not pored over heartache and unrequited sentimentality for years so that our generation could decide that four letters is simply one too many to express how we feel.

Why do fools fall in love? I'll tell you why, because everybody else has simply got too much else to do.

Erik Satie died on July 1, 1925; his last words were 'Ah, the cows...

What is more yours than what always holds you back?

All work is the avoidance of harder work.

Memories leave a light in the eyes, just as plain as scars.

You shine like love You shine like hate until I can’t remember the difference

What would she have done if she'd been in that situation? Mrs. Richardson would ask herself this question over and over, before Michael's call and for weeks - and months - after. Each time, faced with this impossible choice, she came to the same conclusion. I would never have let myself get into that situation, she told herself. I would have made better choices along the way.

George Smiley: [quoting an old letter from Bill Haydon about Jim Prideaux] He has that heavy quiet that commands. He's my other half. Between us we'd make one marvelous man. He asks nothing better than to be in my company or that of my wicked, divine friends, and I'm vastly tickled by the compliment. He's virgin, about eight foot tall, and built by the same firm that did Stonehenge

What?” Richardson snarled. “No smart retort, Mr. Gautier? Cat swallow your tongue?” Nick gave her a charming grin he didn’t really feel. “No, ma’am. A gator named Sense Formerly Known as Common.” Sneering at him, she tottered her way to her desk so that she could insult someone else and ruin their day. Caleb let out an annoyed breath. -Great,- he projected to Nick. -Now I have to get detention, too. I really hate you, Gautier.- Nick batted his eyelashes at Caleb. -But I wubs you, Caliboo.- That succeeded in wringing a groan out of Caleb. “What was that, Mr. Malphas?” Richardson asked. “Severe intestinal woe caused by an external hemorrhoid that seems to be growing on my right-hand side.” He cast a meaningful glower toward Nick. The class erupted into laughter as Richardson shot to her feet. “Enough!” She slammed her hands on her desk. “For that, Mr. Malphas, you can join Mr. Gautier in after-school detention.” Caleb let out an irritated sigh. --More quality time with my hemorrhoid. Just what I wanted for Christmas. Yippee ki-yay.--

A new breed of Republicans has taken over the GOP. It is a new breed which is seeking to sell to Americans a doctrine which is as old as mankind—the doctrine of racial division, the doctrine of racial prejudice, the doctrine of white supremacy,” Robinson said. He added that he now knew “how it felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.”40

My favourite pub game is, of course, snooker. Any game whose rules basically amount to finding a table covered in mess and slowly and methodically putting it all away out of sight is one with which I can empathise emphatically.

You know not the value of the heart you have insulted... You, sir, I thank you, have lowered my fortunes: but, I bless God, that my mind is not sunk with my fortunes. It is, on the contrary, raised above fortune, and above you[.]

I am where I am and it's the perfect place to start. I have what I have and it's more than enough. I'm creating what I'm creating by what I think, say and do. I'm going where I'm going, and a thousand angels are with me too.

When his father asked why A wasn't apple or B wasn't bird or C wasn't cat, young Ambrose explained that things didn't always have to be the way you'd expect. Everybody does apples and birds and cats, he said, and it's boring to do what everybody else does.

Sometimes, the smallest moments in your life have the greatest impact. They soar straight into a place deep inside you, and resonate with the very core of your heart, sinking deep into your memory, to remind you later, that life and love can bring you magic you didn’t know existed.

I believe passionately in love, I even believe in 'the one' to a certain exert, but I am willing to play the waiting game and patiently await their arrival rather than dive into relationships I know not to be right in the mean time.

I had no right telling you how you should feel. No right claiming knowledge on things I could and will never feel. I've never known harm or exile because of my skin. Nor felt the lash of leather whips or angry tongues because of it.

One likes to think that there is some fantastic limbo for the children of imagination, some strange, impossible place where the beaux of Fielding may still make love to the belles of Richardson, where Scott’s heroes still may strut, Dickens’s delightful Cockneys still raise a laugh, and Thackeray’s worldlings continue to carry on their reprehensible careers. Perhaps in some humble corner of such a Valhalla, Sherlock and his Watson may for a time find a place, while some more astute sleuth with some even less astute comrade may fill the stage which they have vacated.

Art demands what, to women, current civilisation won't give. There is for a Dostoyevsky writing against time on the corner of a crowded kitchen table a greater possibility of detachment than for a woman artist no matter how placed. Neither motherhood nor the more continuously exacting and indefinitely expansive responsibilities of even the simplest housekeeping can so effectively hamper her as the human demand, besieging her wherever she is, for an inclusive awareness, from which men, for good or ill, are exempt.

It did not matter that people went about talking about nice books, interesting books, sad books, 'stories' - they would never be that to her. They were people. More real than actual people. They came nearer. In life everything was so scrappy and mixed up. In a book the author was there in every word.

Terror is the instinct that tells you to run, dear God, run, she murmured. Run for your life. But it just makes you into meat. Predators take the ones who run. Horror is the mind-thing, the worm of knowledge you can't stop turning over no matter how awful it is. It grows in your mind and destroys you by your own intelligence.

In this stillness that is at the same time movement, in this darkness that is at the same time light, change is found not in the realm of ideas but in the energizing desire that is realized through precipitation. Desire tends towards its own realization and change takes place when the desire for it shatters the bounds of the possible, breaking the dialectical equilibrium holding together the framework of what is existent. It is at such moments that the imaginary flows into the real and overwhelms it, inundating it until it has been absorbed.

There's nothing wrong with your color, being you," he said firmly. "Nothing wrong with what the good Lord gives us in His world, Cussy Mary." He didn't know, couldn't know, the load I'd carried as a Blue, the scorn and hatred and gruesome marriage. How dare Pa call me vain and now Jackson. How dare he too? "Nothing wrong—" Jackson repeated. I stepped back and shot out a shaky hand. "No, Jackson Lovett, you're wrong. There is nothing wrong with your color in your world, a world that wants only whiteness.

It is by now proverbial that every proverb has its opposite. For every Time is money there is a Stop and smell the roses. When someone says You never stand in the same river twice someone else has already replied There is nothing new under the sun. In the mind's arithmetic, 1 plus -1 equals 2. Truths are not quantities but scripts: Become for a moment the mind in which this is true.

To me the great divide is between the talkative and the quiet. Do they just say everything that's on their minds, even before it's on their minds? Sometimes I think I could just turn up my head like a Walkman so what's going on there could be heard by others. But there would still be a difference. For inside the head they are talking to people like them, and I am talking to someone like me: he is quiet and doesn't much like being talked at; he can't conceal how easily he gets bored.

She struggled in thought to discover why it was she felt that these people did not read books and that she herself did. She felt that she could look at the end, and read here and there a little and know; know something, something they did not know. People thought it was silly, almost wrong to look at the end of a book. But if it spoilt a book, there was something wrong about the book. If it was finished and the interest gone when you know who married who, what was the good of reading at all? It was a sort of trick, a sell. Like a puzzle that was no more fun when you had found it out. There was something more in books than that. . even Rosa Nouchette Carey and Mrs. Hungerford, something that came to you out of the book, any bit of it, a page, even a sentence - and the "stronger" the author was the more came.

Equally, the surrealists consider words as witnesses of life acting in a direct way in human affairs. To use words properly it was necessary to treat them with respect, for they were the intermediaries between oneself and the rest of creation. To abuse them was immediately to set oneself adrift from true being. Words need to be coaxed to reveal a little of their true nature, so as to close the breach that exists between the writer and the universe. The world is not something alien against which man is in conflict. Rather man and cosmos exist in reciprocal motion. We are not cast adrift in an alien or meaningless environment. The universe is intimate with us and, as Breton insisted, it is a cryptogram to be deciphered.

Dr. Bar David?” A young man with black eyes and curly hair came toward him. Carrying a digital recorder. He looked familiar. “Richard Falco, North Richardson High. I took algebra and Calc I from you.” “Oh, yes, of course. Good to see you.” “I’m now reporting for Anchor Media. Just started a couple of months ago.” David started walking away. “Good for you. What a good course of action.” “Listen, I need to get a couple of quotes anyway. I wonder if—Oh, wait! I’m so sorry. You were at the North Richardson school shooting, five years ago.” David nodded. And began to panic. “That’s why you’re here, right?” the stupid student asked. “Protesting gun laws?” “I really need to be going, now. Good luck with your interviews.” Hyperventilating. Richard grabbed David’s shoulder. “But Dr. Bar David. Your story, tragic as it is, ends up being the reason for this whole public gun melting, right? A few words from you about—” David lost it. “Listen! My whole life changed that day. When that meshugener killed my entire family, my wife and my son, in an instant! With a gun he purchased the week before!” David grabbed the kid’s throat. “I do not want to talk about it. Don’t mention me in your article. I will sue you! Leave me alone.” Richard swallowed and nodded, fast. “Sorry, sorry, I’m so sorry—” David started shouting, “The bullets! The bullets! The bullets!” His head pounded. His ears roared.

Any second... now? No. I am a 'mourning person'. Not because anybody close to me has recently passed away, but because I use that term to describe my demeanour at daybreak and as a way of separating myself from what are known as 'morning people' - those high-functioning, grinning morons, who skip out their beds and pounce at the dawn as eagerly and energetically as a young puppy greets a hanging shoelace. My mornings are (with the exception of Christmas Day) dark and sombre affairs, spent grieving the sleep of which I've been robbed; morning is when blades of daylight hack viciously at the dreams that have kept you company through the night.

In our modern world, this elemental quality of storytelling is denied. We live today in a world in which everything has its place and function and nothing is left out of place. Storytelling is thus at a discount and like everything else in a world ruled by the laws of exchange value, literature is required to submit itself to the requirements of the market and must learn, like any other commodity, to adapt and serve needs that lie outside of itself and its concrete value. It is forced to stand not for itself but for an ideological cause of one sort or another, whether it be political, social or literary. It cannot exist for itself: like everything else it has to be justified. And for this very reason the power of storytelling is automatically devalued. Literature is reduced to the status of complimentary utilitarian functions: as a pastime to provide distraction and entertainment, or as a heightened activity that would claim to explore 'great truths' about the human condition.