The Easter Parade Quotes

“And do you know a funny thing? I'm almost fifty years old and I've never understood anything in my whole life.”
― Richard Yates, The Easter Parade

“For a year she found an exquisite pain - almost pleasure - in facing the world as if she didn't care. Look at me, she would say to herself in the middle of a trying day. Look at me: I'm surviving; I'm coping; I'm in control of all this.”
― Richard Yates, The Easter Parade

“They think the way to be a poet is to wear funny clothes and write sideways on the page.”
― Richard Yates, The Easter Parade

“Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life, and looking back it always seemed that the trouble began with their parents’ divorce.”
― Richard Yates, The Easter Parade

“I know I had it - I could feel it, the way you feel blood in your veins - and now I reach for it and reach for it, and it isn't there.”
― Richard Yates, The Easter Parade

“I see,' she said. And when would she ever learn to stop saying 'I see' about things she didn't see at all?”
― Richard Yates, The Easter Parade

“She quickly took a drink to hide her mouth. That mannerism had never changed: whenever Sarah was embarrassed, after she'd told a joke and was waiting for the laughter, or when she was afraid she'd talked too much, she would go for her mouth as if to cover nakedness - with Cokes or popsicles as a child, with drinks or cigarettes now. Maybe all the years of splayed, protruding teeth, and then of braces, had made her mouth the most vulnerable part of her for life.”
― Richard Yates, The Easter Parade

“She had never heard the word 'intellectual' used as a noun before she went to Barnard, and she took it to heart. It was a brave noun, a proud noun, a noun suggesting lifelong dedication to lofty things and a cool disdain for the commonplace. An intellectual might lose her virginity to a soldier in the park, but she could learn to look back on it with wry, amused detachment. An intellectual might have a mother who showed her underpants when drunk, but she wouldn't let it bother her. And Emily Grimes might not be an intellectual yet, but if she took copious notes in even the dullest of her classes, and if she read every night until her eyes ached, it was only a question of time.”
― Richard Yates, The Easter Parade

“There was always a dim chance that the job could lead to employment on a real magazine, which might be fun; besides, college had taught her that the purpose of a liberal-arts education was not to train but to free the mind. It didn't matter what you did for a living; the important thing was the kind of person you were.”
― Richard Yates, The Easter Parade

“Well, your mother has her own way of dealing with information.”
― Richard Yates, The Easter Parade

“He was big and sturdy, with a heavy jaw and a voice that made her want to curl up and ride in his pocket like a kitten.”
― Richard Yates, The Easter Parade

“She bought a chocolate bar and it tasted surprisingly good - as if, without her knowing it, sitting here and eating this chocolate was the one thing she had wanted to do all day.”
― Richard Yates, The Easter Parade

“With their mother lying in a coma twenty miles away, they clung together drunkenly and wept for the loss of their father.”
― Richard Yates, The Easter Parade

“It reminded her too, time and again, of her own susceptibility to panic and her unfathomable dread of being alone.”
― Richard Yates, The Easter Parade

“Emily knew she was going to cry. She tried to avert it with a childhood trick that had sometimes worked before - pressing both thumbnails hard into the tender flesh beneath the nails of her index fingers, so that the self-inflicted pain might be greater than the ache of her swelling throat - but it was no use.”
― Richard Yates, The Easter Parade