01UndatedIntelligent, thinking people could take things like this in their stride, just as they took the larger absurdities of deadly dull jobs in the city and deadly dull homes in the suburbs. Economic circumstances might force you to live in this environment, but the important thing was to keep from being contaminated. The important thing, always, was to remember who you were.Richard Yates / quote ↗
02UndatedIf my work has a theme, I suspect it is a simple one: that most human beings are inescapably alone, and therein lies their tragedy.Richard Yates / quote ↗
03UndatedDying for love might be pitiable, but it wasn't much different, finally, from any other kind of dying.Richard Yates / quote ↗
04UndatedYou see? I don’t know what ‘mature’ means, either, and you could talk all night and I still wouldn’t know. It’s all just words to me, Frank. I watch you talking and I think: Isn’t that amazing? He really does think that way; these words really do mean something to him. Sometimes it seems I’ve been watching people talk and thinking that all my life. And maybe it means there’s something awful the matter with me, but it’s true.Richard Yates / quote ↗
05UndatedAre artists and writers the only people entitled to lives of their own?Richard Yates / quote ↗
06UndatedHe couldn't even tell whether he was angry or contrite, whether it was forgiveness he wanted or the power to forgive.Richard Yates / quote ↗
07UndatedThe whole point of crying was to quit before you cornied 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, let yourself go and you started embellishing your own sobs.Richard Yates / quote ↗
08UndatedAnd Emily had yet to shed a single tear. It troubled her all the way back to the city, and she rode with one hand sandwiched between her cheek and the cool, shuddering glass of the limousine window, as if that might help. She tried whispering 'Daddy' to herself, tried closing her eyes and picturing his face, but it didn't work. Then she thought of something that made her throat close up: she might never have been her father's baby, but he had always called her 'little rabbit.' And she was crying easily now, causing her mother to reach over and squeeze her hand; the only trouble was that she couldn't be sure whether she cried for her father or for Warren Maddock, or Maddox, who was back in South Carolina now being shipped out to a division. But she stopped crying abruptly when she realized that even that was a lie: these tears, as always before in her life, were wholly for herself—for poor, sensitive Emily Grimes whom nobody understood, and who understood nothing.Richard Yates / quote ↗
09UndatedWith their mother lying in a coma twenty miles away, they clung together drunkenly and wept for the loss of their father.Richard Yates / quote ↗
10UndatedHow small and neat and comically serious the other men looked, with their grey-flecked crew cuts and their button-down collars and their brisk little hurrying feet! There were endless desperate swarms of them, hurrying through the station and the streets, and an hour from now they would all be still. The waiting mid-town office buildings would swallow them up and contain them, so that to stand in one tower looking out across the canyon to another would be to inspect a great silent insectarium displaying hundreds of tiny pink men in white shirts, forever shifting papers and frowning into telephones, acting out their passionate little dumb show under the supreme indifference of the rolling spring clouds.Richard Yates / quote ↗
11UndatedWarren Cox, God knew, was no prize; a commercial person, a sales person, the kind of man who said things like "x numbers of dollars". At lunch today, laboriously trying to explain some business procedure, he had said "x number of dollars" three times.Richard Yates / quote ↗
12UndatedI seem to have to lost confidence in just about everything else. I've come to believe that only a very, very few matters in the world can ever be trusted to make sense.Richard Yates / quote ↗
13Undatedif you don’t try at anything, you can’t fail… it takes back bone to lead the life you wantRichard Yates / quote ↗
14UndatedDon't worry, I can't be bothered! You're not worth the trouble it would take to hit you! You're not worth the powder it would take to blow you up. You are an empty, empty, hollow shell of a woman. I mean, what the hell are you doing in my house if you hate me so much? Why the hell are you married to me? What the hell are you doing carrying my child? I mean, why didn't you just get rid of it when you had the chance? Because listen to me, listen to me, I got news for you - I wish to God that you had!Richard Yates / quote ↗
15Undatedif you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone.Richard Yates / quote ↗
17UndatedAs a writer, I like the list of "things to strive for" that Richard Yates kept above his typewriter:genuine claritygenuine feelingthe right wordthe exact English sentencethe eloquent detailthe rigorous dramatization of storyRichard Yates / quote ↗
18UndatedDo you know what the definition of insane is? Yes. It’s the inability to relate to another human being. It’s the inability to love.Richard Yates / quote ↗
19UndatedI still had this idea that there was a whole world of marvelous golden people somewhere, as far ahead of me as the seniors at Rye when I was in the sixth grade; people who knew everything instinctively, who made their lives work out the way they wanted without even trying, who never had to make the best of a bad job because it never occured to them to do anything less then perfectly the first time. Sort of heroic super-people, all of them beautiful and witty and calm and kind, and I always imagined that when I did find them I'd suddenly know that I Belonged among them, that I was one of them, that I'd been meant to be one of them all along, and everything in teh meantime had been a mistake; and they'd know it too. I'd be like the ugly duckling among the swans.Richard Yates / quote ↗
20UndatedHe's been living on the fringes of art for so many years, talking and talking about it, that he's come to expect all the prerogatives of being an artist without ever doing the work. I mean he's an art bum...Richard Yates / quote ↗
21UndatedHe 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 corruptedRichard Yates / quote ↗
