“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.”
Richard Ford“I love 'The Sportswriter' by Richard Ford. Ford really captures for me the bittersweetness of the quietly suffering American man. It's stoic, sad, and really beautiful.”
Mark Ruffalo“America beats on you so hard the whole time. You are constantly being pummeled by other people's rights and their sense of patriotism.”
Richard Ford“ If loneliness is the disease, the story is the cure.”
Richard Ford“Something draws you... An impatience with your own ignorance.”
Richard Ford“With imagination, you can put something where nothing was.”
Richard Ford“Real mystery - the very reason to read (and certainly write) any book - was to them a thing to dismantle, distill and mine out into rubble they could tyrannize into sorry but more permanent explanations; monuments to themselves, in other words. In my view all teachers should be required to stop teaching at age thirty-two and not allowed to resume until they're sixty-five, so that they can live their lives, not teach them away - live lives full of ambiguity and transience and regret and wonder, be asked to explain nothing in public until very near the end when they can't do anything else. Explaining is where we all get into trouble.”
Richard Ford“And I think that in myself (and perhaps evident in what I write) fear of loss and the corresponding instinct to protect myself against loss are potent forces.”
Richard Ford“The question ‘Why poetry?’ isn’t asking what makes poetry unique among art forms; poetry may indeed share its origins with other forms of privileged utterance. A somewhat more interesting question would be: “What is the nature of experience, and especially the experience of using language, that calls poetic utterance into existence? What is there about experience that’s unutterable?” You can’t generalize very usefully about poetry; you can’t reduce its nature down to a kernel that underlies all its various incarnations. I guess my internal conversation suggests that if you can’t successfully answer the question of “Why poetry?,” can’t reduce it in the way I think you can’t, then maybe that’s the strongest evidence that poetry’s doing its job; it’s creating an essential need and then satisfying it.”
Richard Ford“In their faces--plenty of them were handsome, but ruined--I've seen the remnants of who they almost succeeded in being but failed to be, before becoming themselves.”
Richard Ford, Canada“The saved moment is the true art of love.”
Richard Ford, The Sportswriter