James Crumley Quotes

#1. I didn't know what was going on, didn't understand a bit of it, didn't like any of it. Maybe that's why the first thing I packed was my guns. If your brain won't work, wave a gun around. Sometimes that helps.

James Crumley

#2. To what a degree this loose mode of classing and denominating objects has rendered the vocabulary of mental and moral philosophy unfit for the purposes of accurate thinking, is best known to whoever has most meditated on the present condition of those branches of knowledge.

John Stuart Mill

#3. I try to stay two drinks ahead of reality and three behind a drunk

James Crumley

#4. Home is where you hang your hangover.

James Crumley

#5. When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.

James Crumley

#6. What is the will of God? On earth as it is in heaven. If it doesn't exist there, it's not supposed to exist here. If it does exist there, it's supposed to exist here.

Bill Johnson

#7. I chuckled like Aldo Ray. If I had to endure his l'homme du monde act, he had to suffer my jaded alcoholic private eye.

James Crumley

#8. There's no accounting for laws. Or the changes wrought by men and time.

James Crumley

#9. I see the Beatles have arrived from England. They were 40 pounds overweight - and that was just their hair.

Bob Hope

#10. From the 1970s, there has been a significant change in the U.S. economy, as planners, private and state, shifted it toward financialization and the offshoring of production, driven in part by the declining rate of profit in domestic manufacturing.

Noam Chomsky

#11. I deal with pressure. I have a tendency to probably be at my best under pressure.

Kevin Costner

#12. I am what ka and the King and the Tower have made me. We all are. We're caught.

Stephen King

#13. He looks like someone who could slap you or kiss you and you wouldn't be able to tell which one is coming and it would mean the same thing either way.

Alden Bell

#14. Lady bartenders live a tougher life than anybody knows.
Dancing Bear

James Crumley

#15. Youth endures all things, kings and poetry and love. Everything but time.

James Crumley

#16. No society that feeds its children on tales of successful violence can expect them not to believe that violence in the end is rewarded.

Margaret Mead

#17. The Saw Is Family is a great site. You can quote me on that.

Andrew Bryniarski

#18. I have learned some things. Modern life is warfare without end: take no prisoners, leave no wounded, eat the dead
that's environmentally sound.

James Crumley

#19. I had done either too much coke or too little, a constant problem in my life.

James Crumley

#20. And as men believe, so their world goes." - Merlin

Marion Zimmer Bradley

#21. The only person more cynical than a drunk is a reformed drunk.

James Crumley

#22. Therefore, the person living the inner life never condemns and does not criticize the objects of another, however small or ridiculous they may appear, for he knows that every object in the life of a person is but a stepping stone which leads him forward if he only wishes to go forward.

Hazrat Inayat Khan

#23. Nobody lives forever, nobody stays young long enough. My past seemed like so much excess baggage, my future a series of long goodbyes, my present an empty flask, the last good drink already bitter on my tongue.

James Crumley

#24. Consideration touches more deeply and longer than passion.

James Crumley

#25. Where, except in the present, can the eternal be met?

C.S. Lewis

#26. Maybe I will go to Paris.
Who knows? But I'll sure as hell never
Go back to Texas again

James Crumley

#27. The sun rose each morning to stare into my face with the blank but touching gaze of a lovely retarded child.

James Crumley

#28. Somebody's sent a funny little valentine to me. It's a bunch of baby-roses in a vase of filigree, And hovering above them ... is a fairy cupid tangled in a scarf of poetry.

James Whitcomb Riley

#29. I feel like so often I'm just, like, running around and eating in the car, which is, like, not good, or eating as I'm walking down the street.

Gillian Jacobs

#30. Stories are like snapshots, pictures snatched out of time, with clean hard edges. But this was life, and life always begins and ends in a bloody muddle, womb to tomb, just one big mess, a can of worms left to rot in the sun.

James Crumley

#31. I knew the men were probably terrible people who whistled at pretty girls, treated their wives like servants, and voted for Nixon every chance they got, but as far as I was concerned, they beat the hell out of a Volvo-load of liberals for hard work and good times.

James Crumley