Quotessence
Home / Authors / Richard Yates
Richard Yates

Richard Yates Quotes

Novelist

Filter quotes by topic

AllIfsPeopleMenKnowsMightGriefThinkingWantedHonestSaidStillsTryingWayBelieveCryingDoneDyingFeelsHumansJobs

Famous Richard Yates Quotes

“How small and neat and comically serious the other men looked, with their grey-flecked crew cuts and their button-down collars and their brisk little hurrying feet! There were endless desperate swarms of them, hurrying through the station and the streets, and an hour from now they would all be still. The waiting mid-town office buildings would swallow them up and contain them, so that to stand in one tower looking out across the canyon to another would be to inspect a great silent insectarium displaying hundreds of tiny pink men in white shirts, forever shifting papers and frowning into telephones, acting out their passionate little dumb show under the supreme indifference of the rolling spring clouds.”

MenCloudsDesperateIndifferentHurryingRevolutionary RoadButton DownCrew Cut
Book:Revolutionary Road
Create image

“The Revolutionary Hill Estates had not been designed to accommodate a tragedy. Even at night, as if on purpose, the development held no looming shadows and no gaunt silhouettes. It was invincibly cheerful, a toyland of white and pastel houses whose bright, uncurtained windows winked blandly through a dappling of green and yellow leaves … A man running down these streets in desperate grief was indecently out of place.”

IfsMenRunningPurposeNightHouseWhiteGriefStreetsDevelopmentShadowWindowTragedyGreenHillsRevolutionaryDesperateYellowEstatesCheerfulAccommodateSilhouettesLoomingPastelThese StreetsYellow Leaves
Author:Richard Yates
Create image

“It haunted him all night, while he slept alone; it was still there in the morning, when he swallowed his coffee and backed down the driveway in the crumpled old Ford. And riding to work, one of the youngest and healthiest passengers on the train, he sat with the look of a man condemned to a very slow, painless death. He felt middle-aged.”

MenLooksStillsNightFeltMorningMiddleTrainCoffeeSatRidingAll NightPassengersMiddle AgedPainlessDriveway
Book:Revolutionary Road
Create image