Richard Ford

We won’t get rich working for rich men, but we might get lucky hanging around them.

I did not understand, of course, what it meant not to survive.

I thought I was more likely to be a stealer than he was, and I wasn’t one either.

And I thought to myself that my father was not a stupid man, and that love was permanent, even though sometimes it seemed to recede and leave no trace at all.

the feeling in me died out

Sometimes you have to do the wrong thing just to know you’re alive

My father was soft-spoken and good-natured and optimistic–not slick in the way someone might think

my father was in a sense not a usual kind of man: he was innocent and he was honest, and it is possible he was suited perfectly for the life he had made

In the evenings through that summer he would sit at the kitchen table after work, listening to a ball game from the East and drinking a beer, and read the paper while my mother fixed dinner and I did schoolwork in the living room

I don’t know what his ideas for himself were then, but he was a man, more than most, who liked to be happy. And it must’ve seemed as though, just for that time, he had finally come to his right place.