James Carlos Blake > Quotes

“If you're afraid to defend your convictions because you might get your ass kicked for it, you're not really fit to advocate for them.”
― James Carlos Blake

“The vastness of the desert frightened her. Everything looked too far away, even the couldless sky. There was nowhere you could hide in such emptiness.”
― James Carlos Blake, The Rules of Wolfe

“Men tend to remember the best things about the women they've loved and to forget the worst, which is why so many men make the same mistakes with women again and again. Women tend to forget the best things about the men they've loved and to remember the worst, which is why so many women become bitter about men.”
― James Carlos Blake

“A man who can laugh at himself is truly blessed, for he will never lack for amusement.”
― James Carlos Blake, Handsome Harry

“One of the greatest of human follies is that we think we know ourselves so well, that we know how we would act under any conditions, that we would under any circumstance 'do the right thing.' Well, as many have discovered, you don't really know what you'll do in the dark till the lights go out.”
― James Carlos Blake

“The greatest tragedy that can befall a man is never to know who he really is.”
― James Carlos Blake, The Friends of Pancho Villa

“The moon grew plump and pale as a peeled apple, waned into the passing nights, then showed itself again as a thin silver crescent in the twilit western sky. The shed of leaves became a cascade of red and gold and after a time the trees stood skeletal against a sky of weathered tin. The land lay bled of its colors. The nights lengthened, went darker, brightened in their clustered stars. The chilled air smelled of woodsmoke, of distances and passing time. Frost glimmered on the morning fields. Crows called across the pewter afternoons. The first hard freeze cast the countryside in ice and trees split open with sounds like whipcracks. Came a snow flurry one night and then a heavy falling the next day, and that evening the land lay white and still under a high ivory moon.”
― James Carlos Blake, Wildwood Boys

“Never did I fight for the poor. I fought against the rich--which of course isn't at all the same thing. In any case, the fighting was the point. You don't fight to become free--to fight is to be free. A man with a gun and the will to use it can't be mastered, he can only be killed.”
― James Carlos Blake, The Friends of Pancho Villa

“I've never been given to casual use of vulgar language--unwarranted profanity implies mental laziness--but there's no other way to say this: a guy tries to fuck me ... well, fuck him.”
― James Carlos Blake, Handsome Harry

“Sex and violence ... are the two great engines of the world.”
― James Carlos Blake

“You do not tell people to go fuck themselves and then later when you're in trouble ask them to help you.”
― James Carlos Blake, The Rules of Wolfe

“If a woman has a good ass the rest of her wil be nicely configured too, except for maybe the face. The face is always on its own.”
― James Carlos Blake, The Rules of Wolfe

“He was the deadliest man in Texas, on that they all agreed.”
― James Carlos Blake, Pistoleer: A Novel of John Wesley Hardin

“If the devil ever raised a garden, the Everglades was it.”
― James Carlos Blake, Red Grass River: An Epic Southern Gothic of Criminal Folk Heroes, Blood Feuds, and Family Destiny

“The power of men like me does not come solely from our ability to kill--which is no small talent in itself, true, but neither is it as rare as gold. No, the true source of our power is so obvious it sometimes goes unnoticed for what it is: our power comes from other men's lack of courage. There is even less courage in this world than here is talent for killing. Men like me rule because most men are faint of heart in the shadow of death.”
― James Carlos Blake, The Friends of Pancho Villa

“Just because it's a world of thieves out there don't mean there ain't no rules to it.”
― James Carlos Blake, A World of Thieves

“But I'll tell you the truth,boys, he said. I'd give it all up in a minute if I could just be your age again. And I mean without a nickel in my pocket. All the money on earth aint worth spit compared to bein young and havin a dream to chase after. It's nice to arrive at it, no denyin that, but the real fun's in the gettin there. The gettin there.”
― James Carlos Blake

“There's an old saying," Buck said. "A hundred things can go wrong in a holdup, and if you can think of fifty of them you're a damn genius.”
― James Carlos Blake, A World of Thieves

“in the summer of 1845 Edward Little was sixteen years old and restless in his blood.”
― James Carlos Blake, In the Rogue Blood

“I understood more clearly than ever that the line between a noble revolutionary and a lowdown bandit was the line between war and peace.”
― James Carlos Blake, The Friends of Pancho Villa

“Whenever he was unclear about some idea or emotion, uncertain in his perception of someone or vague about a memory, he sat to his journal and wrote as precisely as he could what he thought or felt or remembered, and thereby gave those thoughts and feelings and memories the solidity and authority of words recorded on a page. And by that simple act made of them his abiding truth.”
― James Carlos Blake, Country of the Bad Wolfes

“They loved the sea. They taught themselves to sail, to navigate and read the weather. Without their mother's knowledge and long before she thought them old enough to sail outside the harbor, they were piloting their catboat all the way to the Isles of Shoals. They were on the return leg of one such excursion when the fickle weather of early spring took an abrupt turn and the sky darkened and the sun vanished and the wind came squalling off the open sea. They were a half mile from the harbor when the storm overtook them. The rain struck in a slashing torrent and the swells hove them so high they felt they might be sent flying--then dropped them into troughs so deep they could see nothing but walls of water the color of iron. They feared the sail would be ripped away. Samuel Thomas wrestled the tiller and John Roger bailed in a frenzy and both were wide-eyed with euphoric terror as time and again they were nearly capsized before at last making the harbor. When they got home and Mary Margaret saw their sodden state she scolded them for dunces and wondered aloud how they could do so well in their schooling when they didn't have sense enough to get out of the rain.”
― James Carlos Blake, Country of the Bad Wolfes

“The family landed in the Western Hemisphere in the person of Roger Blake Wolfe, who arrived with a price on his head.”
― James Carlos Blake, Country of the Bad Wolfes

“Just imagine coming from people of two different races that had not a blamed thing in common except a love of blood in every which way. Imagine knowing your white daddy was a robber and killer just crazy with greed who raped your Indian momma who herself believed in cutting out people's hearts to please the gods and eating what was left of the victim.”
― James Carlos Blake, Country of the Bad Wolfes

“He would know a number of grown women in his life who did not possess even a small portion of the grace his middle sister owned at the age of fourteen.”
― James Carlos Blake, Wildwood Boys

“It was my grandmother who first told me that a woman marries a man in the belief that he'll change but he doesn't -- and a man marries a woman in the belief that she won't change but she does.”
― James Carlos Blake

“He finally comprehended that the sole impossibility regarding human sorrow is to arrive at some unsurpassable limit to it.”
― James Carlos Blake, Country of the Bad Wolfes

“Pride has traditionally been regarded as the foremost of the Seven Deadly Sins, but it has rather obviously been overtaken by Greed.”
― James Carlos Blake

“Some of us are always in the borderlands no matter where we might be on the map.”
― James Carlos Blake, Borderlands: Short Fictions

“Without the right to defend yourself--and the right to possesss the means to do it--all other supposed rights are so much hot air.”
― James Carlos Blake