Richard Russo

Ultimately, your theme will find you. You don't have to go looking for it.

And there comes a time in your life when you realize that if you don't take the opportunity to be happy, you may never get another chance again.

What if all everybody needed in the world was to be sure of one friend? What if you were the one, and you refused to say those simple words?

After all, what was the whole wide world but a place for people to yearn for their heart's impossible desires, for those desires to become entrenched in defiance of logic, plausibility, and even the passage of time, as eternal as polished marble.

Not giving a shit, she decided, is like the defrost option on a car's heater that miraculously unfogs the windshield, allowing you to see where you're headed.

People sometimes get in the habit of being loyal to a mistake.

What I discovered I liked best about striking out on my bicycle was that the farther I got from home, the more interesting and unusual my thoughts became.

Which is why we have spouses and children and parents and colleagues and friends, because someone has to know us better than we know ourselves. We need them to tell us. We need them to say, "I know you, Al. You are not the kind of man who.