James Sallis Quotes

#1. 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.

James Sallis

#2. 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.

James Sallis

#3. Time went by, which is what time does, what it is.

James Sallis

#4. That you're Borges.' Manny laughed. 'Of course you are, you dumb shit. That's the whole point.

James Sallis

#5. 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.

James Sallis

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

James Sallis

#7. I drive. That's what I do. All I do.

James Sallis

#8. 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.

James Sallis

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

James Sallis

#10. 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.

James Sallis

#11. Truth is, of course, relative. But then, so is relative.

James Sallis

#12. Closure is for jars, books, and closet doors.

James Sallis

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

James Sallis

#14. What'd you need?"
"Desuetude."
"Reading again, are we? Could be dangerous. It means to become unaccustomed to. As in something gets discontinued, falls into disuse."
"Thanks, man."
"That it?"
"Yeah, but we should grab a drink sometime.

James Sallis

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

James Sallis

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

James Sallis

#17. You're not very good at this, are you?'
'At what I do, I'm the best. This isn't what I do.

James Sallis

#18. This is what people are talking about when they use words like grace.
That moment, that morning, came vividly back to him whenever he thought of it. But soon suspicion set in. He understood well enough that life by very definition is upset, movement, agitation.

James Sallis

#19. Driver had the keys bunched in his hand, one braced and protruding between second and third fingers. Stepping directly forward, he punched his fist at alpha dog's windpipe, feeling the key tear through layers of flesh, looking down as he lay gasping for air.

James Sallis

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

James Sallis

#21. Change yourself, you change the world?

James Sallis

#22. Father, the dark moths crouch at the sills of the earth, waiting.

James Sallis

#23. Anxiety. Dissociation. The words came easily. We attach them to processes, they migrate to the people themselves, and we think: Now I understand. But we don't, and the words themselves interdict further attempts to do so. Maryanne

James Sallis

#24. 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.

James Sallis

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

James Sallis

#26. The dam of my eyes broke, and tears flooded the land.

James Sallis

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

James Sallis

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

James Sallis

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

James Sallis

#30. 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.

James Sallis

#31. He drove. That was what he did. What he'd always do.

James Sallis

#32. 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.

James Sallis

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

James Sallis

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

James Sallis

#35. Some brainless comedy where actors with perfect white teeth spoke their lines then froze in place to let the laugh track unwind.

James Sallis

#36. We're professionals. People make deals, they need to stick to them. That's the way it works, if it's going to work at all.

James Sallis

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

James Sallis

#38. 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.

James Sallis