James Sallis Quotes & Sayings

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

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

Closure is for jars, books, and closet doors. — James Sallis

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

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. — James Sallis

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

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

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

Father, the dark moths crouch at the sills of the earth, waiting. — James Sallis

That you're Borges.' Manny laughed. 'Of course you are, you dumb shit. That's the whole point. — James Sallis

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

What critics might call eclectic, and Eastern folks quirky, we Southerners call cussedness-and it's the cornerstone of the American genius. As in: 'There's a right way, a wrong way, and my way.' You want to see how that looks on the page, pick up any of Craig McDonald's novels. He's built him a nice little shack out there way off all the reg'lar roads, and he's brewing some fine, heady stuff. Leave your money under the rock and come back in an hour. — James Sallis

Truth is, of course, relative. But then, so is relative. — James Sallis

Time went by, which is what time does, what it is. — James Sallis

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

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

I drive. That's what I do. All I do. — James Sallis

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. — James Sallis

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

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

I was coming up on a cross street when a man wearing a filthy suit stepped out from around the corner of the building ahead and directly into my path. Bent with age, he turned bleak red eyes to me and stared. Pressed with his chest to both hands he carried a paperback book as soiled and bereft as his suit. Are you one of the real ones or not? he demanded. And after a moment, when I failed to answer, he walked on, resuming his sotto voce conversation.
A chill passed through me. Somehow, indefinably, I felt, felt with the kind of baffled, tacit understanding that we have in dreams , that I had just glimpsed one possible future self. — James Sallis

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

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

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

He drove. That was what he did. What he'd always do. — James Sallis

Change yourself, you change the world? — James Sallis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — James Sallis

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

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

The dam of my eyes broke, and tears flooded the land. — James Sallis

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

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. — James Sallis

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

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. — James Sallis

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

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

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

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