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1390b99
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there's no right way to plan a life and no right way to live one--only plenty of wrong ways.
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Richard Ford |
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7dbf342
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Everything has seemed beckoning and ahead, though I am unsure now if life has not suddenly passed me like a big rumbling semi and left me flattened here by the road.
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Richard Ford |
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96b8457
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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 glimps..
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marriage
literary
crime
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Richard Ford |
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b565aa2
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And now, while he didn't particularly think any of these stories was a bit truer, he did realize that he didn't really know his wife at all; and that in fact the entire conception of knowing another person--of trust, of closeness, of marriage itself--while not exactly a lie since it existed if only as an idea (in his parents' life, at least marginally) was still completely out-of-date, defunct, was something typifying another era, now unf..
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marriage
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Richard Ford |
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8d4b4c0
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You survived. Whatever doesn't kill us makes us stronger, right?" I don't, of course, believe this. Most things that don't kill us right off, kill us later."
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Richard Ford |
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35953c3
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It was on such a night as this that the unhappy things came about.
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Richard Ford |
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d43e909
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And what there is to learn from almost any human experience is that your own interests usually do not come first where other people are concerned--even the people who love you--and that is all right. It can be lived with.
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Richard Ford |
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e8e046a
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She ordered a martini and encouraged me to, but said she couldn't drink it with her medication. She just liked seeing it in front of her, like the old days, all set to do its little magic.
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memories
life
siblings
nostalgia
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Richard Ford |
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0f7ece7
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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.
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writing
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Richard Ford |
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816b17a
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Just exactly what that good life was--the one I expected--I cannot tell you now exactly, though I wouldn't say it has not come to pass, only that much has come in between.
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Richard Ford |
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10eb5cc
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Teachers, let me tell you, are born deceivers of the lowest sort, since what they want from life is impossible -- time-freed, existential youth forever. It commits them to terrible deceptions and departures from the truth. And literature, being lasting, is their ticket.
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Richard Ford |
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4d6ea23
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It was as if I'd already left some time before and was just catching up with myself.
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Richard Ford |
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27fc534
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He smiled at me, and it was not the worried, nervous smile from before, but a smile that meant he was pleased. And I don't remember him ever smiling at me that way again.
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Richard Ford |
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2622396
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The kind of happy I was that day at the Vet when "Hawk" Dawson actually doffed his red "C" cap to me, and everyone cheered and practically convulsed into tears - you can't patent that. It was one shining moment of glory that was instantly gone. Whereas life, real life, is different and can't even be appraised as simply "happy", but only in terms of "Yes, I'll take it all, thanks" or "No, I believe I won't." Happy, as my poor father used to ..
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life
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Richard Ford |
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28a0491
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It was if we all sensed we'd be gone someday soon in a sudden instant--often it happened in the middle of the night--and didn't want to get involved. Or else it was that none of us wanted to know anybody later on who was the way we were now.
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friends
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Richard Ford |
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f557d39
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If there's another thing that sportswriting teaches you, it is that there are no transcendent themes in life. In all cases things are here and they're over, and that has to be enough.
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Richard Ford |
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def6bca
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Any rainy summer morning, of course, has the seeds of gloomy alienation sown in. But a rainy summer morning far from home - when your personal clouds don't move but hang - can easily produce the feeling of the world as seen from the grave. This I know.
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Richard Ford |
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49e0ac2
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The things you'll never do don't get decided at the end of life, but somewhere in the long gray middle, where you can't see the dim light at either end.
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Richard Ford |
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a1cf58e
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And there are words, significant words, you do not want to say, words that account for busted-up lives, words that try to fix something ruined that shouldn't be ruined and no one wanted ruined, and that words can't fix anyway. Telling
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Richard Ford |
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57b16be
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Fincher was the kind of Southerner who will try to address you through a web of deep and antic southernness, and who assumes every body in earshot knows all about his parents and history and wants to hear an update about them at every opportunity. He looks young, but still manages to act 65.
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southern
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Richard Ford |
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e0ef468
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Against these forces -- an earth rotating, a sun lowering its angle in the sky, winds filling with rain and the geese arriving -- time is just a made-up thing, and recedes in importance, and should.
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Richard Ford |
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6313d5c
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Most things dopn't stay the way they are very long.
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Richard Ford |
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c206d26
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I had more positive views. Which made me feel that although I hadn't been taught to assimilate, a person perhaps assimilated without knowing it. I was doing it now. You did it alone, and not with other or for them. And assimilating possibly wasn't so hard and risky and didn't need to be permanent. This state of mind conferred another freedom on me and was like starting life over, or as I've already said, becoming someone else -- but someone..
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Richard Ford |
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f981c78
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that life can't be escaped and must be faced entirely.
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Richard Ford |
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ec9bf84
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She looked at me and the expression on her face was an expression of dislike, one I hadn't seen before but knew right away. Later I would see it turned toward other people. But the first time was looking at me and was because she believed she'd done all she could that was correct and the best thing, and it had only gotten her stuck with me. And I couldn't do anything that mattered. Though if I could I would've had my father be there, or War..
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Richard Ford |
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767e649
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I don't look in mirrors anymore. It's cheaper than surgery.
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Richard Ford |
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553c32b
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How amazingly far normalcy extends; how you can keep it in sight as if you were on a raft sliding out to sea, the stitch of land growing smaller and smaller. Or in a balloon swept up on a column of prairie air, the ground widening and flattening, growing less and less distinct below you. You notice it, or you don't notice it. But you're already too far away and all is lost.
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Richard Ford |
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0d492b2
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All this is a natural part of the aging process, in which you find yourself with less to do and more opportunities to eat your guts out regretting everything you have done.
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Richard Ford |
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c73a388
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Plenty of times I've seen writers, famous novelists and essayists, even poets, with names you'd recognize and whose work I admire, drift through these offices on one high-priced assignment or other. I have seen the anxious, weaselly lonely looks in their eyes, seen them sit at the desk we give them in a far cubicle, put their feet up and start at once to talk in loud, jokey, bluff, inviting voices, trying like everything to feel like member..
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Richard Ford |
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e0d563d
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Probably many people's vision of "thinking something through" is of this nature: you do precisely what you want to do--if you can."
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Richard Ford |
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014a035
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if sportswriting teaches you anything, and there is much truth to it as well as plenty of lies, it is that for your life to be worth anything you must sooner or later face the possibility of terrible, searing regret. Though you must also manage to avoid it or your life will be ruined.
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Richard Ford |
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4278f5e
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If there's another thing that sportswriting teaches you, it is that there are no transcendent themes in life. In all cases things are here and they're over, and that has to be enough. The other view is a lie of literature and the liberal arts, which is why I did not succeed as a teacher, and another reason I put my novel away in the drawer and have not taken it out.
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Richard Ford |
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edf561a
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My parents...were people running from the past, who didn't look back at much if they could help it, and whose whole life always lay somewhere in the offing.
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parents
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Richard Ford |
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893ea9e
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I knew you could know the words but not match them with the life. But to be able to do it right said something about you. And I didn't know if my judgment was good enough, or exactly what was good or bad. Though there must be times, I thought, when there was no right thing to know, just as there were times when there was no right thing to do.
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Richard Ford |
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4983396
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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--like 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.
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Richard Ford |
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ed2c26e
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I'm a verb, Frank. Verbs don't answer questions.
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verbs
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Richard Ford |
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5f348dd
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Athletes, by and large, are people who are happy to let their actions speak for them, happy to be what they do. As a result, when you talk to an athlete, as I do all the time in locker rooms, in hotel coffee shops and hallways, standing beside expensive automobiles--even if he's paying no attention to you at all, which is very often the case--he's never likely to feel the least bit divided, or alienated, or one ounce of existential dread. H..
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Richard Ford |
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a22715f
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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.
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time
dreaming
staring
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Richard Ford |
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0c03178
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good counsel: generosity, longevity, acceptance, relinquishment, letting the world come to me -- and, with these things to make a life.
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Richard Ford |
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517e9a2
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It's hard to go through life without killing someone.
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Richard Ford |
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a2c5303
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I was born into an ordinary, modern existence in 1945, an only child to decent parents of no irregular point of view, no particular sense of their place in history's continuum, just two people afloat on the world and expectant like most others in time, without a daunting conviction about their own consequence.
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Richard Ford |
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462ecf6
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He was like my father. They each wanted me to be their audience, to hear the things they needed to express.
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fatherhood
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Richard Ford |
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a3ed979
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A lot of things seem one way but are another. And how a thing seems is often just the game we play to save ourselves from great, panicking pain.
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Richard Ford |
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5302e96
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I don't, after all, know what's wrong with him, am not even certain anything is, or that wrong isn't just a metaphor for something else, which may itself already be a metaphor. Though probably what's amiss, if anything, is not much different from what's indistinctly amiss with all of us at one time or another - we're not happy, we don't know why, and we drive ourselves loony trying to get better
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Richard Ford |