Success Quote by Richard Ford

Ford makes leaving sound less like an ending than a diagnostic test. The word "interesting" does sly work here: it refuses the melodrama we usually attach to departure. Instead of grief or triumph, he offers curiosity, a writerly posture that turns life into material. Even thinking about leaving counts. The exit begins in the mind, where we rehearse separation long before we pack a bag, and where the real stakes reveal themselves.

The sentence pivots on a tough distinction: what we can part with and what we can't. That's not just about objects or addresses; it's about identity. Places hold our routines, our self-image, our grudges, our sense of who knows us. Leaving forces an audit of attachments: which ones were chosen, which ones were inherited, which ones were simply convenient. Ford's subtext is that the self is partly portable and partly stubbornly local, and you only learn the difference under the pressure of departure.

Then he turns the knife into a gift: leaving "offers us something new to look forward to". The phrasing is almost transactional, as if loss comes with store credit. It's an insistence on forward motion without denying cost. In Ford's fiction, people often flee, drift, relocate - not as reinvention fantasies, but as ordinary attempts to get unstuck. This line captures that American restlessness with adult realism: escape isn't purity; it's possibility, and possibility is what keeps the psyche from calcifying. Dreaming, here, isn't naive; it's the mind's way of staying alive while it lets go.