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Straight Man QUOTES

Straight Man QUOTES

1 " Nor do I want the woman that I’m married to and that I love to leave me, but the thought of her doing so moves me in a way that our growing old together and contentedly slipping, in affectionate tandem, toward the grave does not. "

― Richard Russo , Straight Man

2 " It’s not an easy time for any parent, this moment when the realization dawns that you’ve given birth to something that will never see things the way you do, despite the fact that it is your living legacy, that it bears your name. "

― Richard Russo , Straight Man

3 " - You get more misanthropic every day.

- I get older every day. My experience of human nature gets wider and deeper. "

― Richard Russo , Straight Man

4 " 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. "

― Richard Russo , Straight Man

5 " As I drift back into sleep, I can't help thinking that it's a wonderful thing to be right about the world. To weigh the evidence, always incomplete, and correctly intuit the whole, to see the world in a grain of sand, to recognize its beauty, its simplicity, its truth. It's as close as we get to God in this life, and reside in the glow of such brief flashes of understanding, fully awake, sometimes for two or three seconds, at peace with our existence. And then back to sleep we go. "

― Richard Russo , Straight Man

6 " Truth be told, I'm not an easy man. I can be an entertaining one, though it's been my experience that most people don't want to be entertained. They want to be comforted. And, of course, my idea of entertaining might not be yours. I'm in complete agreement with all those people who say, regarding movies, 'I just want to be entertained.' This populist position is much derided by my academic colleagues as simpleminded and unsophisticated, evidence of questionable analytical and critical acuity. But I agree with the premise, and I too just want to be entertained. That I am almost never entertained by what entertains other people who just want to be entertained doesn't make us philosophically incompatible. It just means that we shouldn't go to movies together. "

― Richard Russo , Straight Man

7 " To expect reason is where the fallacy lies. "

― Richard Russo , Straight Man

8 " He looks like he could be taken in a fight. Not by me, but by somebody. Not anyone in Humanities, probably. "

― Richard Russo , Straight Man

9 " The world is divided between kids who grow up wanting to be their parents and those like us, who grow up wanting to be anything but. Neither group ever succeeds. "

― Richard Russo , Straight Man

10 " That afternoon I came to understand that one of the deepest purposes of intellectual sophistication is to provide distance between us and our most disturbing personal truths and gnawing fears. "

― Richard Russo , Straight Man

11 " Who but an English professor would threaten to kill a duck a day and hold up a goose as an example? "

― Richard Russo , Straight Man

12 " It's possible to overlook character flaws of in-laws for the simple reason that you feel neither responsible for them nor genetically implicated. "

― Richard Russo , Straight Man

13 " Because the truth is, we never know for sure about ourselves. Who we'll sleep with if given the opportunity, who we'll betray in the right circumstance, whose faith and love we will reward with our own...Only after we've done a thing do we know what we'll do... "

― Richard Russo , Straight Man

14 " The task he has chosen for himself, of wooing my mother with a bright red pickup truck, a Patsy Cline tape, and a string of malapropisms, is ample justification to me for not taking the world too seriously, its relentless heartbreak notwithstanding. "

― Richard Russo , Straight Man

15 " His carefully calculated sincerity is almost entirely indistinguishable from the real thing. "

― Richard Russo , Straight Man

16 " When my nose finally stops bleeding and I've disposed of the bloody paper towels, Teddy Barnes insists on driving me home in his ancient Honda Civic, a car that refuses to die and that Teddy, cheap as he is, refuses to trade in. "

― Richard Russo , Straight Man

17 " They're around back," she calls down when Julie and I get out. "Planning their strategy." "Good for them," I say, confident that no strategy that isn't grounded in chaos theory is likely to work against a man like me. "

― Richard Russo , Straight Man

18 " [My] explanation makes such immediate sense that I can give it up only reluctantly, a necessary concession to my physician's expertise. This is the way my students feel, I realize, when I suggest stylistic revisions. They like the sentence the way they wrote it. They defer to my greater knowledge and experience because they must, but they still like the way the original sentence sounded when it had a dangling modifier, and they secretly suspect that my judgment, while generally sound, may be flawed in this instance. And they're a little miffed at my insistence... "

― Richard Russo , Straight Man

19 " My mother has always been the sort of woman whose emotional state can be intuited from the volume at which she rattles kitchen utensils. "

― Richard Russo , Straight Man

20 " It was my opinion (then and now) that two people who love each other need not necessarily have the same dreams and aspirations, but they damn well ought to share the same nightmares. "

― Richard Russo , Straight Man