Best 36 quotes of James Richardson on MyQuotes

Anger has been ready to be angry.

Any virtue systematically applied becomes a vice. Morality is attention, not system.

I don't know what's meant by Know thyself, which seems to ask a window to look at a window.

If you do more than your share you'd better want to: otherwise, you're paying yourself in a currency recognized nowhere else.

I'm a kid checking mail, a kid on his cell with his questions: are we in love, Life, are we exclusive, are we forever?

It is by now proverbial that every proverb has its opposite. For every Time is money there is a Stop and smell the roses. When someone says You never stand in the same river twice someone else has already replied There is nothing new under the sun. In the mind's arithmetic, 1 plus -1 equals 2. Truths are not quantities but scripts: Become for a moment the mind in which this is true.

It is the empty seats that listen most raptly.

I would never accuse Willie Brown of slowing down, because he never does.

Metaphor isn't just a fancy turn of speech. It shapes our thoughts and feelings, reaches out to grasp new experience, and even binds our five disparate senses. James Geary's fascinating and utterly readable I is an Other brings the news on metaphor from literature and economics, from neuroscience and politics, illuminating topics from consumer behavior to autism spectrum disorders to the evolution of language. As a writer, as a teacher, and as someone just plain fascinated by how our minds work, I've been waiting years for exactly this book.

Nothing important comes with instructions.

Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half is preventing people from reading what they expected you to mean.

Reason is the lesser faith that steers us when we have already lost a greater one.

The best way to know your faults is to notice which ones you accuse others of.

The happy and the suffering probably understand life equally well, but the sufferers may see a little more clearly how little it is that they understand.

They say productivity is the key to confidence, and confidence ... to productivity. And they're happy walking back and forth between these two rooms, each the excuse for the other.

Too much apology doubles the offense.

When I am trying to write I turn on music so I can hear what is keeping me from hearing.

Who breaks the thread, the one who pulls, the one who holds on?

Writing is like washing windows in the sun. With every attempt to perfect clarity, you make a new smear.

You have two kinds of secrets. The ones only you know. The ones only you don't.

a little run in the sheer black of the universe

And as for those who might have been following me, odds are I lost them long, long ago. Nothing to do but keep on driving as clearly as if I hadn't, flashing my change of lane and exit, in case there's anyone who needs to know.

and whatever happens to love that hasn't been used enough, has happened.

Hope is a door left unlatched in a high wind banging and banging itself to pieces.

I look over my old books, happiest when I find a line it seems I could not have written.

I sell my time to get enough money to buy it back.

It never came down to two roads at all, or if it did, I took the one less traveled by for a driveway, or the entrance to a mall, or it slipped past like a station off the air while I bent down to fiddle with the dial.

Loving yourself is about as likely as tickling yourself.

My best critic is me, too late.

She started reading novels to put herself in the way of secret lives.

The reader lives faster than life, the writer lives slower.

The way things broken off a little too soon can last forever.

this is the last house in summer and now is the double loneliness of missing a party you don't even want to be at.

Though now, of all that could have been, there is nothing.

We don't have to be anywhere. The party we left and the one we were headed to are probably over.

You look up from an oldish author: Is he dead? Such power we have, not knowing. Let him live.