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630f8b4
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He'd discovered that his memories of that summer were like bad movie montages - young lovers tossing a Frisbee in the park, sharing a melting ice-cream cone, bicycling along the river, laughing, talking, kissing, a sappy score drowning out the dialogue because the screenwriter had no idea what these two people might say to each other.
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Richard Russo |
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4992373
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But of course everything had conspired to spoil her entrance, which only went to prove what Janine already knew: that no matter how well you planned something, God always planned better. If He was feeling stingy that day and didn't want you to have some little thing you had your heart set on, then you weren't going to get it and that was all there was to it.
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Richard Russo |
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4cd6eb5
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Throughout his life a case study underachiever, Sully--people still remarked--was nobody's fool, a phrase that Sully no doubt appreciated without ever sensing its literal application--that at sixty, he was divorced from his own wife, carrying on halfheartedly with another man's, estranged from his son, devoid of self-knowledge, badly crippled and virtually unemployable--all of which he stubbornly confused with independence.
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Richard Russo |
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b62c868
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There are a great many sins in this world, none of them original.
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Richard Russo |
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7d6556f
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Tick's strategy for dealing with lying adults is to say nothing and watch thee lies swell and constrict in their throats. when this happens, the lie takes on a physical life of its own and must be either expelled or swallowed. Most adults prefer to expel untruths with little burplike coughs behind their hands, while others chuckle or snort or make barking sounds. When Mr. Meyer's Adam's apple bobs once, Tick sees that he's a swallower, and ..
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Richard Russo |
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347ddd0
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Because the truth is, we never know for sure about ourselves. Who we'll sleep with if given the opportunity, who we'll betray in the right circumstance, whose faith and love we will reward with our own...Only after we've done a thing do we know what we'll do...
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Richard Russo |
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7c30521
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If you paid me for work," continued Max, whose rhetoric was more sophisticated than you might expect from a man with food in his beard, "I wouldn't have to feel worthless. There's not law says old people have to feel worthless all the while, you know. You paid me, I'd have some dignity." Now it was Mile's turn to nod and smile agreeably. "I think the dignity ship set sail a long time ago, Dad."
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Richard Russo |
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49ba3d1
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if making things seem prettier than they are is a lie, then making them seem uglier must be another.
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Richard Russo |
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39b0911
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Stories worked much the same way...A false note at the beginning was much more costly than one nearer the end because early errors were part of the foundation.
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Richard Russo |
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1a41646
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That man truly loathes you," Herbert says when he's sure Rourke isn't coming back. "I don't think so," I smile. "I just give his life focus, that's all."
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Richard Russo |
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7f381b2
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My mother had more than once remarked that my father was one of the war's casualties, that the Sam Hall who came back wasn't the one who left, the one she'd fallen in love with. I didn't doubt that she believed this certain truth, or even that it was true, after a fashion. But it was a nice way of ignoring another simple truth--that people changed, with or without wars, and that we sometimes don't know people as well as we think we do, that..
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Richard Russo |
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435baac
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Though here his voice faltered, because he knew as well as she did what came next, what words came next. If he could speak them, he might even convince her they were true, as his father had convinced his mother that Browning summer. It was the worst lie there was, imprisoning and ultimately embittering the hearer, playing upon her terrible need to believe. He could feel the I love you forming on his lips. Would he have said it if she hadn't..
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richard russo |
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a032395
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There have been times," Father Mark admitted, "when I feared that God would turn out to be like my maternal grandmother [...] Ours was a large family, and every Christmas my grandmother gave gifts of cash in varying amounts, claiming she was rewarding her grandchildren according to how much they loved her. She swore she could look right into our hearts and know. One child would get a crisp fifty-dollar bill, the next a crumpled single. No t..
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Richard Russo |
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a03661e
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Can it be that what provides for us is the very thing that poisons us? Who hasn't considered this terrible possibility?
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Richard Russo |
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fce692a
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For Miles, one of the great mysteries of marriage was that you had to actually say things before you realized they were wrong. Because he'd been saying the wrong thing to Janine for so many years, he'd grown wary, testing most of his observations in the arena of his imagination before saying them out loud, but even then he was often wrong. Of course, the other possibility was that there was no right thing to say, that the choice wasn't betw..
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Richard Russo |
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238f2a6
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It's not an easy time for any parent, this moment when the realization dawns that you've given birth to something that will never see things the way you do, despite the fact that it is your living legacy, that it bears your name.
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Richard Russo |
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b9fdd82
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Miss Beryl: Doesn't it bother you that you haven't done more with the life God gave you? Sully: Not often. Now and then.
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Richard Russo |
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f3bc303
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a story is like a virus that can rage only for as long as there are new hosts to infect.
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Richard Russo |
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57e1f60
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No, Sully'd decided long ago to abstain from all but the most general forms of regret. He allowed himself the vague wish that things had turned out differently, without blaming himself that they hadn't, any more than he'd blamed himself when his 1-2-3 triple never ran like it should at least once. It didn't pay to second-guess every one of life's decisions, to pretend to wisdom about the past from the safety of the present, the way so many ..
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sully
wisdom
words-to-live-by
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Richard Russo |
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8fc8c37
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What an absolute folly love was. Talk about a flawed concept.
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Richard Russo |
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afb782d
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She gave him a smile in which hope and knowledge were going at it, bare-knuckled, equally and eternally matched.
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Richard Russo |
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ce9bf95
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Since her retirement from teaching Miss Beryl's health had in many respects greatly improved, despite her advancing years. An eighth-grade classroom was an excellent place to snag whatever was in the air in the way of illness. Also depression, which, Miss Beryl believed, in conjunction with guilt, opened the door to illness. Miss Beryl didn't know any teachers who weren't habitually guilty and depressed--guilty they hadn't accomplished more..
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guilt
illness
teaching
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Richard Russo |
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8444d54
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The task he has chosen for himself, of wooing my mother with a bright red pickup truck, a Patsy Cline tape, and a string of malapropisms, is ample justification to me for not taking the world too seriously, its relentless heartbreak notwithstanding.
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Richard Russo |
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899218e
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His carefully calculated sincerity is almost entirely indistinguishable from the real thing.
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Richard Russo |
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a0ca435
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Perfect silence. This in response to Sully's key being turned in the ignition of the pickup.
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Richard Russo |
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937e71e
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At the center of the bouquet is a monstrous peony, probably purchased on sale at the supermarket. By Tuesday its curling petals had begun to collect at the bottom of the vase, infusing the room with the faint but unmistakable sweet odor of corruption and imminent death. ... In Tick's opinion there was something extravagantly excessive about the peony from the start, as if God had intended so suggest with this particular bloom that you could..
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Richard Russo |
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4448e29
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When my nose finally stops bleeding and I've disposed of the bloody paper towels, Teddy Barnes insists on driving me home in his ancient Honda Civic, a car that refuses to die and that Teddy, cheap as he is, refuses to trade in.
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Richard Russo |
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604129b
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I hear you don't write any more," he says... "Not true," I inform him. "You should see the margins of my student papers." "Not the same as writing a book though, right?" "Almost identical," I assure him. "Both go largely unread."
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Richard Russo |
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3e51ecd
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The drive back to the Mid-fucking-west was always brutal, his parents barely speaking to each other, as if suddenly recalling last year's infidelities, or maybe contemplating whom they'd settle for this year. Sex, if you went by Griffin's parents, definitely took a backseat to real estate on the passion gauge.
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Richard Russo |
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eb1f30a
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diverting one's attention from the past was not the same as envisioning and embarking upon a future. On the other hand, if the past were razed, the slate wiped clean, maybe fewer people would confuse it with the future, and that at least would be something.
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Richard Russo |
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058c4d0
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And so began my final stage of my boyhood in Mohawk. Later, as an adult, I would return from time to time. As a visitor, though, never again as a true resident. But then I wouldn't be a true resident of any other place either, joining instead the great multitude of wandering Americans, so many of whom have a Mohawk in their past, the memory of which propels us we know not precisely where, so long as it's away. Return we do, but only to gain..
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Richard Russo |
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2ae8154
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She never answers during the day," Max explained. "She lets her machine pick up." People like you are the reason other people get answering machines to begin with," Miles told him. "In fact, people like you are driving a lot of modern technology."
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Richard Russo |
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ac089dc
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My mother has always been the sort of woman whose emotional state can be intuited from the volume at which she rattles kitchen utensils.
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Richard Russo |
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e1917f5
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So what? Few men, Miles reflected, lived so comfortably within the confines of a two.word personal philosophy.
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Richard Russo |
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306bfa7
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It was hard to imagine him in love. I knew that he and my mother must have once felt passion, since that was what love entailed, but I was grateful that over time the madness had evolved into something more like friendship or a business partnership, something I myself could be an integral part of. Even seeing my father recollect passion was disconcerting.
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Richard Russo |
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2f847c4
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They're around back," she calls down when Julie and I get out. "Planning their strategy." "Good for them," I say, confident that no strategy that isn't grounded in chaos theory is likely to work against a man like me."
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Richard Russo |
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ea3d14b
|
Late middle age, he was coming to understand, was a time of life when everything was predictable and yet somehow you failed to see any of it coming.
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Richard Russo |
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12f798b
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People actually seemed to enjoy recalling that on a Saturday afternoon forty years ago Empire Avenue was bustling with people and cars and commerce, whereas now, of course, you could strafe it with automatic weapons and not harm a soul.
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Richard Russo |
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20e8bd9
|
Whereas God, for reasons of His own, sometimes chooses to let the machine answer. The Supreme Being is unavailable to come to the phone at this time, but He wants you to know what your call is important to Him. In the meantime, for sins of pride, press one. For avarice, press two...
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Richard Russo |
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ed09836
|
My] explanation makes such immediate sense that I can give it up only reluctantly, a necessary concession to my physician's expertise. This is the way my students feel, I realize, when I suggest stylistic revisions. They like the sentence the way they wrote it. They defer to my greater knowledge and experience because they must, but they still like the way the original sentence sounded when it had a dangling modifier, and they secretly susp..
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Richard Russo |
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81c18b7
|
Lucy, who apparently had no idea his girlfriend's father held him in such low regard, agreed with Noonan that he was pushing the envelope, behaviorwise. Still, he was genuinely fond of the man and didn't want to believe there was anything seriously wrong. After all, he argued, wasn't Mr. Berg's lunacy born of genius? Even though Lucy loved and defended Thomaston, he had to admit that the man was out of place there. He was despised by most f..
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Richard Russo |
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1269f7d
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God) seemed to know everything that was in her heart and to understand that nothing dwelt there that wasn't absolutely necessary to her survival.
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Richard Russo |
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dbe4722
|
Interesting, Miles thought. Like himself, Father Mark, as a child, had been reassured by the imagined proximity of God, whereas adults, perhaps because they so often were up to no good, took more comfort from His remoteness.
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god
sin
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Richard Russo |
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7198a5d
|
Lives are rivers. We imagine we can direct their paths, though in the end there's but one destination, and we end up being true to ourselves only because we have no choice.
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Richard Russo |