Richard Yates
88 quotes
"You want to play house, you got to have a job. You want to play very nice house, very sweet house, then you got to have a job you don't like. Great. This is the way ninety-eight-point-nine per cent of the people work things out, so believe me, buddy, you've got nothing to apologize for."
"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."
"Intelligent, 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."
"I mean talk about decadence," he declared, "how decadent can a society get? Look at it this way. This country's probably the psychiatric, psychoanalytical capital of the world."
"How small and neat and comically serious the other men looked, with their gray-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."
"Wow," he said. "Now you've said it. The hopeless emptiness. Hell, plenty of people are on to the emptiness part; out where I used to work, on the Coast, that's all we ever talked about. We'd sit around talking about emptiness all night. Nobody ever said 'hopeless', though; that's where we'd chicken out. Because maybe it does take a certain amount of guts to see the emptiness, but it takes a whole hell of a lot more to see the hopelessness. And I guess when you do see the hopelessness, that's where there's nothing to do but take off. If you can."
"I 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 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 occurred to them to do anything less than 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 the meantime had been a mistake; and they'd know it too. I'd be like the ugly duckling among the swans."
"You know?" he said. "This is the kind of thing that really—" he paused, examining the wisp of smoke that curled from his wet pipestem. "Really makes you stop and think."
"After a while he stopped listening. His ears took in only the rise and fall of her voice, the elaborate, familiar, endless rhythm of it; but from long experience he was able to say "Oh yes" or "Of course," in all the right places."
"Why couldn't she stop talking? Did all lonely people have that problem?"
""You make it sound so easy." But that was one of the wonderful things about Sterling Nelson: he could make any difficult thing sound easy, and the only other man she had ever known who could do that was Willard Slade. All the others, George, for example, had made easy things sound difficult."
"(and when would she ever learn not to monopolize a whole evening's conversation?)"
"That had the sound of a good exit line, so she went quickly into her room and slammed the door."
"Her face, in the spattered mirror, was a shocked and wild-eyed ruin."
"He seemed decent and kindly enough, but Prentice was cautioned by an old and trusted rule of his schooldays: Beware of the first friendly one; he's probably an outcast himself."
"Sumbitch wasn't even needed, that's the funny part; just some eager-beaver bastard couldn't mind his own business."
"After a second or two he thrust the muzzle forward and broke out the pane of glass, less because he knew it would make for a better aim than because it was what gunmen always did behind windows in movies."
"The first drink tasted so good that he let her do most of the talking while he savored it, sitting beside her and watching her profile. The tip of her small nose bobbed very slightly up and down at each syllable beginning with p, b or m, and that seemed a lovely thing for a girl's nose to do."
""There's something we have to discuss," she said, and from the way she said it he knew it wouldn't be a discussion at all. She had something to tell him - something he wouldn't like - and he had better shut up and sit down and listen."
"she talked less, or at least did less of the kind of talking whose only purpose was to fill silence"
"..."a man doesn't spend all these years building something and then kick it to pieces. Don't - well, to put it coarsely, don't shit where you eat.""
"It seemed only a few minutes later that he woke with a sense that the world was coming apart."
"You don't have much use for black people, do you, Mr Wilder? Deep down you wish we'd all go away. You think our lips are too thick and our noses too flat and you shudder at the thought of our kinky hair. Isn't that about right, Mr Wilder?"
""I see," she said. And when would she ever learn to stop saying 'I see' about things she didn't see at all?"
"and for an hour or two they talked in circles."