James Sallis Quotes

Growing ever smaller in the distance. Carrying that pain and sadness back with her to the lair where it, and she, lived.

Get Carter remains among the great crime novels, a lean, muscular portrait of a man stumbling along the hard edge - toward redemption. Ted Lewis cuts to the bone.

Closure is for jars, books, and closet doors.

He existed a step or two to one side of the common world, largely out of sight, a shadow, all but invisible. Whatever he owned, either he could hoist it on his back and lug it along or he could walk away from it. Anonymity was the thing he loved most about the city, being a part of it and apart from it at the same time.

Why'd you call, boy? What did you want from me?"
"The company of a friend, I think."
"Always a cheap treat.

The whole city was a compass. How could anyone ever have gotten so hopelessly lost here?

In the darkness things always go away from you. Memory holds you down while regret and sorrow kick hell out of you. The only help you'll get is a few hard drinks and morning.

My old man was eighty-six per cent white bread and a hundred per cent asshole.

My mother by then had already begun her own decline, her own transformation, hardening into a bitter rind of a woman who pushed through the stations of her day as though each moment were unpleasant duty; as though the currencies of joy had become so inflated they could no longer purchase anything of worth.

We can make up for our actions. But for our inactions, what we fail to do ...

Maybe he should turn around. Go back and tell them that's what life was, a long series of things that didn't go down the way you thought they would.
Hell with it. Either they'd figure it out or they wouldn't. Most people never did.

Drinking also maroons you without provisions on the island of self. Like most other promises it makes, alcohol's vow of kinship, that it will bridge your life to others, smooth the way, proves false. Fooled again: you're alone.

Here we raise his children for him, cook for him, bring up his crops, butcher his hogs - even fight his wars for him - and he still won't acknowledge our existence.

Think we choose our lives?"
"No. But I don't think they're thrust upon us, either. What it feels like to me is, they're forever seeping up under our feet.

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What are any of our lives but the shapes we force them into. Memory doesn't come to us of its own; we go after it, pull it into sunlight and make of it what we need, what we're driven towards, what we imagine, changing the world again and again with each new quarry, each descent, each morning.

Mostly what you lose with time, in memory, is the specificity of things, their exact sequence. It all runs together, becomes a watery soup. Portmanteau days, imploded years. Like a bad actor, memory always goes for effect, abjuring motivation, consistency, good sense.

Bombs fall and wipe out civilization as we know it, two things come up out of the ashes: roaches and F-150s.

You're an unpopular man. Memorable-but remarkably unpopular. You have no friends, for instance, in Brooklyn. Around Henry Street, say, where old women sit on the stoops in their aprons and men play dominoes on cardtables by the curb.

Everything's interesting. You just have to look closely."
"And most people don't.

We aren't angels. Angels couldn't breathe the air down here. They'd die.

Life sends us messages all the time - then sits around laughing over how we're not gonna be able to figure them out.

The things we do pile up on us, weigh us down. Or hold us in place, at very least.

The best predictor of preschool children's physical activity is simply being outdoors.

Find beauty, try to understand, survive.

Rina's always claimed that I expect too little from life," Standard said.
"Then at least you'll never be disappointed.

I wondered then: what was it that started a person sinking? Was that long fall in him (or her) from the start, in us all perhaps; or something he put there himself, creating it over time and unwittingly just as he created his face, his life, the stories he lived by, the ones that let him go on living.

Something radically new, the producer tells me. Think Virginia Woolf with dead bodies and car chases.

Much later, as he sat with his back against an inside wall of a Motel 6 just north of Phoenix, watching the pool of blood lap toward him, Driver would wonder whether he had made a terrible mistake. Later still, of course, there'd be no doubt. But for now Driver is, as they say, in the moment. And the moment includes this blood lapping toward him, the pressure of dawn's late light at windows and door, traffic sounds from the interstate nearby, the sound of someone weeping in the next room.

Perhaps after all, for all our talk of change, redemption or personal growth, for all our dependence on therapists, religious faith or mood-altering drugs both legal and non, we're doomed simply to go on repeating the same patterns over and over in our lives, dressing them up in different clothes like children at play so we can pretend we don't recognize them when we look into mirrors.

First thing you do, room, bar, restaurant, town or crib, is check and memorize the ways out.