Explore Quotes by Richard Yates

Know what we did, Lucy? You and me? We spent our whole lives yearning. Isn't that the God damndest thing?

She was calm and quiet now with knowing what she had always known, what neither her parents nor Aunt Claire nor Frank nor anyone else had ever had to teach her: that if you wanted something to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone.

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.

He found it so easy and so pleasant to cry that he didn’t try to stop for a while, until he realized he was forcing his sobs a little, exaggerating their depth with unnecessary shudders. … The whole point of crying is to quit before you coined 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

if you don’t try at anything, you can’t fail… it takes back bone to lead the life you want

No one forgets the truth; they just get better at lying.

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?

Can you really think artists and writers are the only people entitled to lives of their own?

Hard work, is the best medicine yet devised for all the ills of man- and of woman.

People did change, and a change could be a bloom as well as a withering.

Our ability to measure and apportion time affords an almost endless source of comfort.

And do you know a funny thing? I'm almost fifty years old and I've never understood anything in my whole life.

...his job was the very least important part of his life, never to be mentioned except in irony.

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?

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.

if you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone.

The Revolutionary Hill Estates had not been designed to accommodate a tragedy. Even at night, as if on purpose, the development held no looming shadows and no gaunt silhouettes. It was invincibly cheerful, a toyland of white and pastel houses whose bright, uncurtained windows winked blandly through a dappling of green and yellow leaves … A man running down these streets in desperate grief was indecently out of place.