Richard Russo

Being mayor of Empire Falls was a full-time job with a part-time salary,

If chickens had any idea what was in store for them, they’d stay where they were in their eggs.

Good fences make good neighbors.

The terrible truth was that such slender gestures seemed even to Miles, at sixteen, both too much and too little, more than just about everyone else was willing to do but far less than conscience dictated.

it was a lot easier to forget a thousand things you wanted to remember than the one thing you wanted to lose sight of.

Just because things happen slow doesn’t mean you’ll be ready for them.

“Slow” works on an altogether different principle, on the deceptive impression that there’s plenty of time to prepare, which conceals the central fact, that no matter how slow things go, you’ll always be slower.