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The Risk Pool

Richard Russo

Top 10 Best Quotes

“My mother had more than once remarked that my father was one of the war's casualties, that the Sam Hall who came back wasn't the one who left, the one she'd fallen in love with. I didn't doubt that she believed this certain truth, or even that it was true, after a fashion. But it was a nice way of ignoring another simple truth--that people changed, with or without wars, and that we sometimes don't know people as well as we think we do, that the worst errors in judgment often result from imagining we understand what has escaped us entirely.”

“To weigh and evaluate a vast grid of information, much of it meaningless, and to arrive at sensible, if erroneous, conclusions, is a skill not to be sneezed at.”

“And so began my final stage of my boyhood in Mohawk. Later, as an adult, I would return from time to time. As a visitor, though, never again as a true resident. But then I wouldn't be a true resident of any other place either, joining instead the great multitude of wandering Americans, so many of whom have a Mohawk in their past, the memory of which propels us we know not precisely where, so long as it's away. Return we do, but only to gain momentum for our next outward arc, each further than the last, until there is no elasticity left, nothing to draw us home.”

“Lest it seem that I was neglected, I should point out that once I became known to the Mohawk Grill crowd, it was like having about two dozen more or less negligent fathers whose slender attentions and vague goodwill nevertheless added up.”

“the worst errors in judgment often result from imagining we understand what has escaped us entirely.”

“Yes,” she said, looking off somewhere. “I want … my own true love.” Her own true love. The outrageous simplicity, modesty, and arrogance of it took my breath away. It seemed to me, then and now, a wish that everyone had a right to, but that only the very foolish or the terminally naïve trouble themselves over.”

“When you tossed pebbles down from the embankment, they believed in God. One”

“When someone loves you,” she went on, “you don’t have to wish for it to be so. You just know it is.”

“There’s only one thing in life your mother wants,” my father had often remarked, “her own way.” And somehow now, I realized, I’d suddenly come to share his perverse unwillingness to give her her own way if it could possibly be avoided. I’d probably been doing it in little ways since I could remember, thwarting the will of this woman who derived so little pleasure out of life and seldom wanted more than the occasional public demonstration of loyalty and love, a small enough gift, since the gallery she was playing to was primarily in her own imagination.”

“There was nothing like fear to make democracy real.”

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Book Keywords:

human-nature

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