James Sallis > Quotes

“The dam of my eyes broke, and tears flooded the land.”
― James Sallis, Ghost of a Flea

“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, Drive

“In my junior year I discovered books. . . . Devoured [them] the way other kids did candy or sandwiches, spent days hunched over . . . my spine an oversized question mark.”
― James Sallis, The Long-Legged Fly

“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, Drive

“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, The Long-Legged Fly

“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, Black Hornet

“We aren’t angels. Angels couldn’t breathe the air down here. They’d die.”
― James Sallis, The Long-Legged Fly

“Find beauty, try to understand, survive.”
― James Sallis, Black Night's Gonna Catch Me Here: New and Selected Poems

“Time went by, which is what time does, what it is.”
― James Sallis, Drive

“Everything’s interesting. You just have to look closely.”
“And most people don’t.”
― James Sallis, Driven

“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, Ghost of a Flea

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

“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, Moth

“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, Drive

“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, Drive

“The whole city was a compass. How could anyone ever have gotten so hopelessly lost here?”
― James Sallis, Drive

“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, Bluebottle

“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, Drive

“Every day we reconstruct ourselves out of the salvage of our yesterdays.”
― James Sallis, Death Will Have Your Eyes

“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, The Long-Legged Fly

“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, Drive

“Truth is, of course, relative. But then, so is relative.”
― James Sallis, The Killer Is Dying

“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, Black Hornet

“Rina’s always claimed that I expect too little from life,” Standard said.
“Then at least you’ll never be disappointed.”
― James Sallis, Drive

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

“I drive. That's what I do. All I do.”
― James Sallis, Drive

“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, Moth

“He drove. That was what he did. What he’d always do.”
― James Sallis, Drive

“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, Drive

“Father, the dark moths crouch at the sills of the earth, waiting.”
― James Sallis, Bluebottle