Richard Russo Quotes

My personal telephone book is a book of the dead now. I'm so old. Almost all of my friends have died, and I don't have the guts to take their names out of the book.

It is misery, you know, unspeakable misery for the man who lives alone and who detests sordid, casual affairs; not old enough to do without women, but not young enough to be able to go and look for one without shame!

I see no comfort in outliving one's friends, and remaining a mere monument of the times which are past.

We didn't love freedom enough.

I've got more friends than I've ever had in my life at the age of 39 - although given that I didn't have any friends until the age of 27, it doesn't say much - because I found the internet.

The man abandoned by his friends, one after another, without just cause, will acquire, the reputation of being hard to please, changeable, ungrateful, unsociable.

When you get to be my age there are more and more people you have known that you miss. Brion [Gysin], Antony Balch, Ian Summerville are ones I think of right away I was quite close to.

On the outside, Oscar simply looked tired, no taller, no fatter, only the skin under his eyes, pouched from years of quiet desperation, had changed. Inside, he was in a world of hurt. He saw black flashes before his eyes. He saw himself falling through the air. He knew what he was turning into. He was turning into the worst kind of human on the planet: an old bitter dork. Saw himself at the Game Room, picking through the miniatures for the rest of his life. He didn't want this future but he couldn't see how it could be avoided, couldn't figure his way out of it. Fukú.

Unmissed but by his dogs and by his groom.

If we have no friends, we have no pleasure; and if we have them, we are sure to lose them, and be doubly pained by the loss.

Being immortal must have a lot of attractions. You can travel all over the world, see everything, do everything. But what happens if you are immortal and your friends and family are not? You are then destined to watch them age and die.

One day you're racing about the business of life, harried but vital, a part of its machinery. Then gradually but inexorably you are left out, until one day you find the machinery tearing along without you - and nobody even notices.

Middle age is the way you would feel about summer if you knew there would never be another spring.

Who that has plodded on to middle age would take back upon his shoulders ten of the vanished years, with their mingled pleasures and pains? Who would return to the youth he is forever pretending to regret?

One of the things you realize about gettin older is that not everybody is goin to get older with you.

I have always had plenty of friends, and now at age sixty, I face four walls as a common prisoner.

Drink up, boys, drink up and don’t worry, if we finish this bottle we’ll go down and buy another one. Of course, it won’t be the same as the one we’ve got now, but it’ll still be better than nothing. Ah, what a shame they don’t make Los Suicidas mezcal anymore, what a shame that time pases, don’t you think? what a shame that we die, and get old, and everything good goes galloping away from us.

Sometimes we lose friends for whose loss our regret is greater than our grief, and others for whom our grief is greater than our regret.

there are worse things than being alone but it often takes decades to realize this and most often when you do it's too late and there's nothing worse than too late

When you know a friend is there you do not go to see him. Then he's gone and you blast your conscience to shreds that you did not see him.

Silver is forty-four years old, if you can believe it, out of shape, and depressed—although he doesn’t know if you call it depression when you have good reason to be; maybe then you’re simply sad, or lonely, or just painfully aware, on a daily basis, of all the things you can never get back.

What does long life avail? The best seats at the funerals of friends.

When I had money, money, O! I knew no joy till I went poor; For many a false man as a friend Came knocking all day at my door.

I have lost friends, some by death...others by sheer inability to cross the street.