Robert James Waller Quotes

Enjoy the top 66 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Robert James Waller.

“The overriding problem with our country, and our world in general, is that we are, in large part, managed by incompetents. Most of these are men who have spent their lives seeking power rather than themselves.”
— Robert James Waller —

“Once a person knows a kiss and a kind word, you can't blame him for never wanting to live without them again.”

— Robert James Waller

“The human heart has a way of making itself large again even after it's been broken into a million pieces.”

— Robert James Waller

“The old dreams were good dreams; they didn't work out but I'm glad I had them.”

— Robert James Waller

“It's clear to me now that I have been moving toward you and you toward me for a long time. Though neither of us was aware of the other before we met, there was a kind of mindless certainty bumming blithely along beneath our ignorance that ensured we would come together. Like two solitary birds flying the great prairies by celestial reckoning, all of these years and lifetimes we have been moving toward one another.”

— Robert James Waller

“Analysis destroys wholes. Some things, magic things, are meant to stay whole. If you look at their pieces, they go away.”

— Robert James Waller

And in that moment, everything I knew to be true about myself up until then was gone. I was acting like another woman, yet I was more myself than ever before.

— Robert James Waller

“The heart never forgets, never gives up, the territory marked off for those who came before.”

— Robert James Waller

“Complex things are easy to do. Simplicity's the real challenge.”

— Robert James Waller

“I sometimes have the feeling you've been here a long time, more than one lifetime, and that you've dwelt in private places none of the rest of us has even dreamed about.”

— Robert James Waller

“So here I am walking around with another person inside of me. Though I think I put it better the day we parted when I said there is a third person we have created from the two of us. And I am stalked now by that other entity.”

— Robert James Waller

“We have both lost ourselves and created something else, something that exists only as an interlacing of the two of us.”

— Robert James Waller

When a woman makes the choice to marry, to have children, in one way her life begins but in another way it stops.Â You build a life of details.Â You become a mother, a wife and you stop and stay steady so that your children can move. And when they leave they take your life of details with them. And then you're expected to move again only you don't remember what moves you because no one has asked in so long. Not even yourself.

— Robert James Waller

“Such physical matters were nice, yet, to him, intelligence and passion born of living, the ability to move and be moved by subtleties of the mind and spirit, were what really counted.”

— Robert James Waller

“The road is a strange place. Shuffling along, I looked up and you were there walking across the grass toward my truck on an August day. In retrospect, it seems inevitable - it could not have been any other way
a case of what I call the high probability of the improbable”

— Robert James Waller

“One great love in a single lifetime was enough for anyone.”

— Robert James Waller

“The old dreams were good dreams; the didn't work out, but I'm glad I had them.”

— Robert James Waller

“I don't like feeling sorry for myself. That's not who I am. And most of the time I don't feel that way. Instead, I am grateful for having at least found you. We could have flashed by one another like two pieces of cosmic dust.
God or the universe or whatever one chooses to label the great systems of balance and order does not recognize Earth-time. To the universe, four days is no different than four billion light years. I try to keep that in mind.
But, I am, after all, a man. And all the philosophic rationalizations I can conjure up do not keep me from wanting you, every day, every moment, the merciless wail of time, of time I can never spend with you, deep within my head.
I love you, profoundly and completely. And I always will.
The last cowboy,
Robert”

— Robert James Waller

“He was an animal. A graceful, hard, male animal who did nothing overtly to dominate her yet dominated her completely, in the exact way she wanted that to happen at this moment.”

— Robert James Waller

“I am the highway and a peregrine and all the sails that ever went to sea”

— Robert James Waller

“Life is never easy for those who dream.”

— Robert James Waller

You make pictures, not take them?
Yes. At least that's how I think of it. That's the difference between Sunday snapshooters and someone who does it for a living ... I don't just take things as given, I try to make them into something that reflects my personal consciousness, my spirit. I try to find the poetry in the image.

— Robert James Waller

“It already smells good," he said, pointing toward the stove. "It smells ... quiet." He looked at her.
"Quiet? Could something smell quiet" She was thinking about the phrase, asking herself. He was right. After the pork chops and steaks and roasts she cooked for the family, this was quiet cooking. No violence involved anywhere down the food chain, except maybe for pulling up the vegetables. The stew cooked quietly and smelled quiet.”

— Robert James Waller

“And, man he cried when he talked. He cried big tears, the kind it takes an old man to cry, the kind it takes a saxophone to play.”

— Robert James Waller

Gypsies make difficult friends for ordinary people, and he was seething of a gypsy.

— Robert James Waller

“Sometime I'm going to do an essay called 'The Virtues of Amateurism' for all of those people who wish they earned their living in the arts. The market kills more artistic people than anything else. It's a world of safety out there, for most people. They want safety, the magazines and manufacturers give them safety, give them homogeneity, give them the familiar and comfortable, don't challenge them.”

— Robert James Waller

“She wore ribbons in her black hair and clung to her dreams”

— Robert James Waller

“No secrets, no mystery. no mystery, no life worth rememberin'. no life worth rememberin', no life worth goin' on.”

— Robert James Waller

Neither of them spoke, they simply stood there, sending, receiving, imprinting the feel of each on the other, indelibly.

— Robert James Waller

His eyes looked directly at her, and she felt something jump inside. The eyes, the voice, the face, the silver hair, the easy way he moved his body, old ways, disturbing ways, ways that draw you in. Ways that whisper to you in the final moment before sleep comes, when the barriers have fallen.

— Robert James Waller

“Robert, there's a creature inside of you that I'm not good enough to bring out, not strong enough to reach. I sometimes have the feeling you've been here a long time, more than one lifetime, and that you've dwelt in private places none of the rest of us has even dreamed about. You frighten me, even though you're gentle with me. If I didn't fight to control myself with you, I feel like I might lose my center and never get back.”

— Robert James Waller

“People mistake shyness and reclusiveness- both of those- for arrogance. It's a convenient label slapped on by those who see only the surface of things and nothing more.”

— Robert James Waller

“Francesca was feeling good feelings, old feelings, poetry and music feelings.”

— Robert James Waller

“In a way, women were asking for men to be poets and driving, passionate lovers at the same time.”

— Robert James Waller

The marketing people are always talking about something called 'consumers'. I have this image of a fat little man in baggy Bermuda shorts, a Hawaiian shirt, and a straw hat with beer-can openers dangling from it, clutching fistfuls of dollars.

— Robert James Waller

“He liked words and images. "Blue" was one of his favorite words. He liked the feeling it made on his lips and tongue when he said it.”

— Robert James Waller

“Francesca said nothing, wondering about a man to whom the difference between a pasture and a meadow seemed important, who got excited about sky color, who wrote a little poetry but not much fiction. Who played the guitar, who earned his living by images and carried his tools in knapsacks. Who seemed like the wind. And moved like it. Came from it, perhaps.”

— Robert James Waller

“The market kills more artistic passion than anything else.”

— Robert James Waller

She was more of a business partner to him than anything else. Some of her appreciated that. But rustling yet within her was another person who wanted to bathe and perfume herself ... and be taken, carried away, and peeled back by a force she could sense, but never articulate, even dimly within her mind.

— Robert James Waller

Custom brings predictability, and predictability carries its own comforts.

— Robert James Waller

“If there's no need to climb, then there's no reason to learn how to climb.”

— Robert James Waller

“Maybe now and then if it's absolutely necessary to cushion someone from a world gone too harsh and bitter.”

— Robert James Waller

“I don't just take things as given, I try to make them into something that reflects my personal consciousness, my spirit.”

— Robert James Waller

“Give me all of you, and I'll give you back yourself when we have finished.
And in the high country she had screamed aloud in some combination of fear and pleasure. And she had done that once more in a bed in Iowa, then turned the scream into a dwindling, involuntary cry for all the things she had once felt and now felt again with another strange man who lived in his own far places.”

— Robert James Waller

“It's kind of strange- in fiction you get to tell lies and are applauded for it.”