Richard L. Evans Quotes

I behaved poorly by starting this whole thing and I made some mistakes in dealing with it, and they made some mistakes in dealing with me, and taking down all my stuff was probably one of them.

When you've burned the bridges behind you, don't go starting a fire on the one in front of you.

It is not enough ... simply to surrender oneself brainlessly to love, when it knocks at the door, one must also calculate because of later life, which does sometimes follow.

Not everyone wants to know everything their partner did. Maybe it's enough to say, "Things aren't going well in our marriage. I've made mistakes. I don't think you've been a good partner to me. How do we go forward together?" I think there's a different answer for every couple. But I think intimacy is asking that question.

From thinking proceeds speaking; thence to acting is often but a single step. But how irrevocable and tremendous!

It must be the ultimate punishment, don't you think, to finally gain wisdom, only to realize that the consequences of your actions are irrevocable?

Any problem, big or small, within a family, always seems to start with bad communication. Someone isn't listening.

The real question is: How do you react? What do you do next? Evade responsibilities? Bury yourself in work? What do you do? All three of my novels take up that question, although none gives an answer.

Somebody who has been in a very bad wreck is going to be very conscientious about not speeding through a yellow light... You just learn so many good lessons when you go through a failed marriage.

I wish I had been a better mother and a more compassionate and understanding wife in both of my marriages.

I think an important lesson from the game is that once you have made a move, you cannot take it back. You really have to measure your decisions. You think a lot. You evaluate your choices very carefully. There's never any guarantee about what's going to follow once you have made a decision.

So many bad things happen in this world because people don't know how to express things.

You can be happy, or you can be right. If you want to be part of a couple and win every argument, you're in trouble.

My ex-wife, she really didn't like the material that I did. And that's something I regret, that I wasn't more careful about making sure that she was O.K. with it. I just sort of didn't ask. So that's how that goes.

In any leadership position, you're always going to be disappointing somebody.

Going into Somalia, I didn't anticipate how many people's lives would be affected by it. In hindsight, I certainly wish I had taken more time to think about that, but I can't change it.

In this job, you're going to make decisions. You'll say things that some people are going to love them, some people are going to hate them. It's just part of the job.

While I very much wanted to be in a relationship, I didn't want to be in the wrong one.

The time not to become a father is eighteen years before a war.

When my wife gets mad at me, I remind myself that she is much smarter than I am and so I probably deserve it, even if I don't really understand it!

And I think if you look at any relationship, for the relationship to be productive and to move forward and to grow, sometimes things have to be said that one person or the other person is not going to like to hear.

You have to negotiate with people who don’t trust you and vica versa. You have to be very careful but you can’t be paralyzed.

When you're in a leadership role, you can never please all of the people all of the time. There's also a lot of responsibility that goes along with it that others may not realize.

You can blame the other guy for saying it, or you can look at yourself and say, 'I must have contributed to this.'

First thing I said to him was, 'LeBron, you know this is true. We had five good years and one bad night'. Like a marriage that's good, and then one bad thing happens, and you never talk to each other again.