"I’ve always been fascinated with this sense that every single person walking down the street has a whole story. It’s so interesting to think about the vast variety of things that can take place within one person’s life, and how nobody ever really knows it, because we only tell parts of our story to different people, and oh, I just want to know it so much! I always have, so I make it up."

"Success did come to me later, but that was okay, I could feel myself getting better with each story or book. Age does matter to me — but that doesn’t mean it has to matter to all writers. It matters to me because as I age my work gets better, but more importantly, I live through more things and see more things, and therefore have more things to say."

"There’s a part of me in every I write, whether it’s male or female, because everything has to go through me. Everything I’ve observed or heard or whatever—it all has to go through me. I’m the one who makes these people up, and so there’s a part of me in some form in all of these people, but I really have made them up. But they’re so real to me, you know? By the time I’m done with them on the page, they’re very, very real to me. They’re just as real to me as anybody that I’ve ever met."

"Well, it is humiliation reflection, that the straightest road to a man's heart is through his palate."

"People surprise you, Frank, with just how fuckin stupid they are. I mean, do you actually realize how much adult conversation is spent on this fuckin business? Facts treated like they were opinions just for the simple purpose of talking about it longer? Some people might think that's interesting, bub, but I'll tell you. It's romanticizing a goddamn rock by calling it a mountain range to me. People waste a helluva lot of time they could be putting to useful purposes. This is a game. See it and forget about it."

"In the fall of 1960, when I was sixteen and my father was for a time not working, my mother met a man named Warren Miller and fell in love with him."

""I'm not worried," I said. And I wasn't, because I thought things would be fine. And even though I was wrong, it is still not so bad a way to set your mind toward the unknown just when you are coming into the face of it."

"When you are sixteen you do not know what your parents know, or much of what they understand, and less of what's in their hearts. This can save you from becoming an adult too early, save your life from becoming only theirs lived over again - which is a loss. But to shield yourself - as I didn't do - seems to be an even greater error, since what's lost is the truth of your parents' life and what you should think about it, and beyond that, how you should estimate the world you are about to live in."

"It's probably nice to know your parents were once not your parents."

"You can get carried away with how things were once, and not how you need to make them better."

"And though they may both have felt that something had died between them, something they may not even have been aware or until it was gone and disappeared from their lives forever, they must've felt - both of them - that there was something of themselves, something important, that could not live at all in any other way but by their being together, much as they had been before."

"I don't see at all why good fiction has to be global fiction. It's the lot of some writers, who are-because of the accidents of history-forced to be on the move. Then there are the Richard Fords and the Russell Banks who may be writing of small town America, but with great gifts, and great compassion. It's making life important, making a single life important, rather than having to have a prescription for the global ills which afflict us."

"I’ve loved all his books, from the characters to the parenthetical sentences. His voice always sounds so casual, as if the narrator is working it out in his head for the first time. There’s quiet intensity, an easy familiarity with the character. You know the habits in how the character thinks, what he might take into account. The narrator is more observational than judgmental, and forgiving in that way. It has much to do with a need to be rewarded for doing more, or compensated for following the rules or recognized as better for working harder. It’s not simple greed. It’s about a sense of self before and after you’ve taken the wrong road to a land of diminishing opportunity."

"Her complexion seemed slowly to be losing its olive color, and the set of her mouth hardened as though interior shifts were taking place she herself didn't know about but which had already corrected her outlook toward the rest of the world."

"One day you think you never even made a choice and then you have to make one, even a wrong one, just so you're sure you're still able. And once that's over, you can go back and be happy again with what you were before you started worrying."

"Sometimes we do not really become adults until we suffer a good whacking loss, and our lives in a sense catch up with us and wash over us like a wave and everything goes."

"I may be too cynical," Catherine says."

"Dawn of a brighter, whiter day Than ever blessed us with its ray,— A dawn beneath whose purer light all guilt and wrong shall fade away."

"Up the sky in silence holy Comes the young moon slowly, slowly, Softly with her light divine, Filling, like a cup with wine."

"The wind is full of memories; It whispers low and clear The sacred echoes of the past, And brings the dead more near."

"O flowers! the soul that faints or grieves New comfort from your lips receives; Sweet confidence and patient faith are hidden in your leaves."

"Backward, flow backward, O tide of the years! I am so weary of toil and of tears,— Toil without recompense, tears all in vain,— Take them and give me my childhood again!"

"Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your flight, Make me a child again, just for to-night!"

"I count no more my wasted tears; They left no echo of their fall; I mourn no more my lonesome years; This blessed hour atones for all."

"Behold, we live through all things,—famine, thirst, Bereavement, pain; all grief and misery, All woe and sorrow; life inflicts its worst On soul and body,—but we can not die. Though we be sick, and tired, and faint, and worn,— Lo, all things can be borne!"