Top 45 Jim Thompson Quotes
#1. The world was a shitpot with a barbed-wire handle and the further he could kick it the better he liked it.
Jim Thompson
#2. Practically every fella that breaks the law has a danged good reason, to his own way of thinking, which makes every case exceptional, not just one or two. Take you, for example.
Jim Thompson
#3. The phone rang. Softly, in actuality, yet it seemed loud and ominous, as phones do at night in dark hotel rooms.
Jim Thompson
#4. I'd been chasing females all my life, not paying no mind to the fact that whatever's got tail at one end has teeth at the other, and now I was getting chomped.
Jim Thompson
#5. He was his own victim, his own slave. He had made personality a profession, created a career out of selling himself. And he could not stray far, or for long, from his self-made self.
Jim Thompson
#6. I rode a streetcar to the edge of the city limits, then I started to walk, swinging the old thumb whenever I saw a car coming.
Jim Thompson
#7. That's what she keeps you around for, to diddle her fiddle. Because you're low-hung and she's high-strung!
Jim Thompson
#9. There is only one plot - things are not what they seem.
Jim Thompson
#10. If we all had what we wanted to eat ... We'd have inflation in the toilet paper industry.
Jim Thompson
#12. It doesn't matter what answers you get if you ask the wrong questions.
Jim Thompson
#13. It's - it's always lightest j-just before the dark.
Jim Thompson
#14. Anyone who deprived her of something she wanted deserved what he got.
Jim Thompson
#15. If the Good Lord made a mistake in us people it was in making us want to live when we've got the least excuse for it.
Jim Thompson
#16. She wasn't much over five feet and a hundred pounds, and she looked a little scrawny around the neck and ankles. But that was all right. It was perfectly all right. The good Lord had known just where to put that flesh where it would really do some good.
Jim Thompson
#17. Usually, during the past fifteen-odd years, I'd hated to see the morning come. That's a psychotic symptom, you know, not wanting to awaken
hating to face things that are bound to be more than you can handle.
Jim Thompson
#18. You might think it wasn't real nice to kick a dying man, and maybe it wasn't, but I'd been wanting to kick him for a long time, and it just never had seemed safe till now
Jim Thompson
#19. I ain't saying you're a liar, because that wouldn't be polite. But I'll tell you this, ma'am. If I loved liars, I'd hug you to death.
Jim Thompson
#20. You can't stamp on a man's corns when he's got his feet cut off.
Jim Thompson
#21. I found out long ago that the place where the law is apt to be abused the most is right around a courthouse.
Jim Thompson
#22. It looked like I'd sold my pottage for a mess of afterbirth, as the saying is. I'd been chasing females all my life, not paying no mind to the fact that whatever's got tail at one end has teeth at the other, and now I was getting chomped on.
Jim Thompson
#23. He was part of this river of cars, aiding its sluggish tide and in turn aided by it. Without losing his identity, free to turn out of the tide when he chose, he still belonged to something.
Jim Thompson
#24. If I wasn't a decent woman I'd heist a leg and pee in your ear until it washed out that stinking pile of crap you call brains.
Jim Thompson
#25. Then he laughed and she laughed. And quivering with the movement of the train, the dead man seemed to laugh too.
Jim Thompson
#26. There are things that have to be forgotten if you want to go on living.
Jim Thompson
#27. Life is a bucket of shit with a barbed wire handle.
Jim Thompson
#28. I kissed her, a long hard kiss. Because baby didn't know it, but baby was dead, and in a way I couldn't have loved her more.
Jim Thompson
#29. Existence and proof are inseparables. You have to have the second to have the first. I
Jim Thompson
#30. What else is there to do but laugh and joke ... how else can you bear up under the unbearable?
Jim Thompson
#31. If I had to marry someone, it wouldn't be a bossy little gal with a tongue like barbed-wire and a mind about as narrow.
Jim Thompson
#32. You go into the office and take a book or two from the shelves. You read a few lines, like your life depended on reading 'em right. But you know your life doesn't depend on anything that makes sense, and you wonder where in the hell you got the idea it did; and you begin to get sore.
Jim Thompson
#33. I finished the ale, started to order a third one, and decided against it. I'd had enough. More than enough. Or I never would have. You take just so much from a bottle, and then you stop taking. From then on you're putting.
Jim Thompson
#34. But even the innocent blow of a child can be painful, possibly more so than that of an adult since its victim cannot bring himself to strike back. His only recourse, when the pain becomes unbearable, is to put himself beyond the child's reach.
Jim Thompson
#35. I told her the world was full of nice people. I'd have hated to try to prove it to her, but I said it, anyway.
Jim Thompson
#36. He had never before realized the blessedness of silence - the freedom to be silent, rather, if one chose. He had never realized, somehow, that such blessedness might be his privilege. He was Doc Mc Coy, and Doc Mc Coy was born to the obligation of being one hell of a guy.
Jim Thompson
#37. You've got forever; and somehow you can't do much with it. You've got forever; and it's a mile wide and an inch deep and full of alligators.
Jim Thompson
#38. He could be breaking apart inside and you'd never know it from the way he acted. He'd be just as pleasant and polite as if he didn't have a care in the world. You had to be careful with someone like that. You could never know what he was thinking.
Jim Thompson
#39. A heck of a lot of things are bound to go wrong in a world as big as this one. And if there's an answer to why it's that way - and there ain't always - why, it's probably not just one answer by itself, but thousands of answers.
Jim Thompson
#40. It had soaked in on him at last, the spot he was in. Soaked clear through a quart of booze until it hit him where he lived and rubbed the place raw.
Jim Thompson
#41. When life attains a crisis, man's focus narrows. [ ... ] The world becomes a stage of immediate concern, swept free of illusion.
Jim Thompson
#42. It was like being asleep when you were awake and awake when you were asleep. I'd pinch myself, figuratively speaking - I had to keep pinching myself. Then I'd wake up kind of in reverse; I'd go back to the nightmare I had to live in. And everything would be clear and reasonable.
Jim Thompson
#43. He kept his back turned and his eyes closed, feeling no shame or anger but only an increasing sickness of soul.
Jim Thompson
#44. What smells good in the store may stink in the stewpot.
Jim Thompson
#45. Maybe it don't seem to make sense for a fella to be doing things for a reason that he don't know about. But I reckon I've been doing it most of my life.
Jim Thompson
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