James Richardson
American poet.
Birds of prey don’t sing.
I sell my time to get enough money to buy it back.
The drives were nature’s first provision: thinking was added later, to get us around the world’s obstacles to them.
Those who are too slow to be intelligent deserve our patience, those who are too quick, our pity.
Only the dead have discovered what they cannot live without.
It is less important to escape pain than to avoid exceptionless rules.
Hasn’t there … been a little too much zeal in our reproof of children and friends for yielding to the temptations we ourselves find it most difficult to resist? We punish where we can least afford to sympathize. Of all the horrors of the daily news, it seems hardest to imagine the kind of cruelty that is intensified by the pain of its victims, but whenever we feel sympathy would weaken us, we are a little closer to the torturer.
Bitterness is a greater failure than failure.
Reason is the lesser faith that steers us when we have already lost a greater one.
I lied. And my embarrassment was so great that I changed everything else to make the lie true.
The god of many cannot remain the true god.
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.
Anger has been ready to be angry.
Your choices: spend, and believe in things; save, and believe in money.
The best way to know your faults is to notice which ones you accuse others of.
Let me have my dreams but not what I dream of.
Patience is decisive indecision.
Why would we write if we’d already heard what we wanted to hear?
Happiness, like water, is always available, but so often it seems we’d prefer a different drink.
What’s thinking? You live in a grandly appointed house, but spend all your time rummaging around in the attic for any little trinket you hadn’t known was there.