Richard Ford Quotes

The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real.

The world you perceive is a drastically simplified model of the real world.

One real world is enough.

Do try to remember this: even the world's not so black as it is painted" -Valerie to Stephen (pg. 408)

The only thing we have to give to the world is our own grasp on it.

Words are small shapes in the gorgeous chaos of the world.

We have names for everything. What if we forgot about those names? And we stopped seeing things as something? What if we just observed things, watched things, without giving them a name, without coming to a conclusion? What do you think would happen? You would transcend everything.

Of the Surface of Things In my room, the world is beyond my understanding; But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four Hills and a cloud.

The effort really to see and really to represent is no idle business in face of the constant force that makes for muddlement. The great thing is indeed that the muddled state too is one of the very sharpest of the realities, that it also has color and form and character, has often in fact a broad and rich comicality.

Africa is people" may seem too simple and too obvious to some of us. But I have found in the course of my travels through the world that the most simple things can still givwe us a lot of trouble, even the brightest among us: this is particularly so in matters concerning Africa.

Everything is simpler than you think and at the same time more complex than you imagine

The real world was far too real to leave neat little hints. It was full of too many things. It wasn't by eliminating the impossible that you got to the truth, however improbable; it was by the much harder process of eliminating the possibilities.

[William Eggleston] sets forth what makes up our ordinary world. What is there, however strange, can be accepted without question; familiarity will be what overwhelms us.

I feel as though the cardboard box of my own reality has been flattened and blown open. Now I can see the edge of the world.

We will first understand how simple the universe is when we recognize how strange it is.

Our perceiving self is nowhere to be found in the world-picture, because it itself is the world-picture.

Truth is too simple for us: we do not like those who unmask our illusions.

Look at the world and see what's there. It's very beautiful. It's a very exciting but in some ways treacherous world, and all this goes into the writing.

Right now a moment of time is fleeting by! Capture its reality in paint! To do that we must put all else out of our minds. We must become that moment, make ourselves a sensitive recording plate...Give the image of what we actually see, forgetting everything that has been seen before our time.

The world is not magic - and that's the most magical thing about it.

I believe that reality is vastly richer than the cursory attention we usually give it permits us to understand. I like to write through a consciousness that allows me to suggest something of this richness.

If you're going into stand-up, you're hyper-analyzing the world and asking as many questions about a thing as you possibly can so you can figure out the ultimate nature of that thing.

I give life to that which I notice. What I don't notice dies.

I have to tell it again and again: I have no doctrine. I only point out something. I point out reality, I point out something in reality which has not or too little been seen. I take him who listens to me at his hand and lead him to the window. I push open the window and point outside. I have no doctrine, I carry on a dialogue.

The world only exists in your eyes. You can make it as big or as small as you want