James Richardson
American poet.
I aspire to know when best to walk or eat, which music I need, and how to keep myself sitting as I am now, stubbornly enraptured with doing practically nothing.
Beware of knowing your virtues; you may lose them. Beware of knowing your vices; you may forgive them.
Greater than the temptations of beauty are those of method.
On what is valuable thieves and the law agree.
Impatience is not wanting to understand that you don’t understand.
It’s amazing that I sit at my job all day and no one sees me clearly enough to say What is that boy doing behind a desk?
I’m surprised that multiple personalities are so much less common in reality than in fiction: what a little disorder it would take, a distraction, a sleep, for one of our minor characters to imagine he was the star, to speak out for everyone else. And that’s what it would be, a change of billing, not of authorship. For you do not write your play—you are just the character in it called The Playwright. The real writer, you never meet.
I’ve spent so long trying to fly that it’s too late to set out on foot.
Success is whatever humiliation everyone has agreed to compete for.
What’s the difference between provincialism, which unthinkingly takes its situation for everyone’s, and cosmopolitanism, which is confident it has the right to?
To practice Sincerity is to burden everyone else with believing you.
The procrastinator dreads beginning, the workaholic, ending.
The single sin is less of a problem than the good reasons for it.
The mind is like a well-endowed museum, only a small fraction of its holdings on view at any one time.
How often feelings are circular. How embarrassing to be embarrassed. How annoying to be annoyed.
If I do not waste time, I am wasting my time.
Embarrassment is the greatest teacher, but since its lessons are exactly those we have tried hardest to conceal from ourselves, it may teach us, also, to perfect our self-deception.
The great consolation of righteousness is never having to worry whether you’re a bore.
If you do everything for one reason, then all you have done will become meaningless when the reason does.
He does not deserve your praise, but he deserves to be treated as if someday he might.