Richard Russo Quotes

I'm a lot more introspective than one would believe.

To understand just one life you have to swallow the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?

We are all prone to the malady of the introvert who with the manifold spectacle of the world spread out before him, turns away and gazes only upon the emptiness within.

Every man contains within himself a ghost continent.

Everyone is an ocean inside. Every individual walking the street. Everyone is a universe of thoughts, and insights, and feelings. But every person is crippled in his or her own way by our inability to truly present ourselves to the world.

All a work of art can do is present the surface. I can't know the insides of people. I know very little about the inside of myself.

It's interesting if you can talk about the large moments and also the small moments to understand the deepest complexities of a man by trying to imagine who they are.

There is a very pensive and intense side to me that even I did not know someone could capture.

The lead character in 'Adaptation' is pretty much me but with more talent. Every time I watch 'Adaptation,' I feel very emotional because it makes me be kinder to myself and see the human situation a little more clearly.

‎Reading good literature is an experience of pleasure...but it is also an experience of learning what and how we are, in our human integrity and our human imperfection, with our actions, our dreams, and our ghosts, alone and in relationships that link us to others, in our public image and in the secret recesses of our consciousness.

To truly know the world, look deeply within your own being; to truly know yourself, take real interest in the world.

People are icebergs. So much of us is underneath.

I don't think I'm a weirdo in a bad way. There's just a lot going on in my head.

Maybe a person's world can grow bigger in all the right ways, not too wide that it becomes shallow, just large enough to preserve its depth.

Each time I changed, it was as if, on purpose, I didn’t want anyone to know too much about me, which of course now I regret, because I closed myself to everything. But it was my way of dealing with things.

I must first know myself, as the Delphian inscription says; to be curious about that which is not my concern, while I am still in ignorance of my own self, would be ridiculous. And therefore I bid farewell to all this; the common opinion is enough for me. For, as I was saying, I want to know not about this, but about myself: am I a monster more complicated and swollen with passion than the serpent Typho, or a creature of a gentler and simpler sort, to whom Nature has given a diviner and lowlier destiny?

It occurs to her that there is one thing about people you can never understand well enough: how entirely inside themselves they are.

Our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves, and of our visible, sensible world.

Everyone has understood me in his own way. But I would have to understand myself first in order to judge - and so far, I haven't.

Understanding of the self only arises in relationship, in watching yourself in relationship to people, ideas, and things; to trees, the earth, and the world around you and within you. Relationship is the mirror in which the self is revealed. Without self-knowledge there is no basis for right thought and action.

And in this curious state I had the realization, at the moment of seeing that stranger there, that I was a person like everybody else. That I was known by my actions and words, that my internal universe was unavailable for inspection by others. They didn't know. They didn't know, because I never told them.

My strength and my weakness is that I see normally impersonal events vividly and personally.

Take some time each day to bring clarity to your inner world.

What I want is to open up. I want to know what's inside me. I want everybody to open up. I'm like an imbecile with a can opener in his hand, wondering where to begin-- to open up the earth. I know that underneath the mess everything is marvelous. I'm sure of it.

It is not half so important to know as to feel.