Jim Thomsen

“He was looking like he felt quite sorry for himself, but happily so, and found a waiter to order more drinks from. He asked for a gin and tonic with those same elaborate instructions he had tried giving in Marianne’s earlier. It had to do with lemon wedges.”
― Dwyer Murphy, The Stolen Coast

“She tried to imagine marriage, as she had as a girl at St. Clerans, her family’s estate in Ireland, covering her eyes with a veil and dream-walking the grounds as a fairy-girl bride, but she quickly came to: There was always present the vortex of a darker past, what had been done to her and Jack as children, what they had done to each other as adults, and would probably, even against their will, do to each other again. In Barcelona they met again. They talked of Regina Le Clery, his friend who had just died in a plane crash at Orly Airport, and again of her mother, killed in a car crash in 1969, who managed her father’s many transgressions ably, like a deposed queen burying a broken heart; and they talked of ghosts, memories that lace the eye; and he fell asleep fingering the pearls, once her mother’s, she wore that night to bed; and following him to France, she discovered he had slept with another woman.”
― Sam Wasson, The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood

“Theirs was a strange generation. They grew up with headlines about marches, protests, and sit-ins; they watched the Vietnam War and Woodstock live on color television; they all wanted to be H. Rap Brown and Jane Fonda and Patty Hearst; and when they turned eighteen and felt the full conviction of their revolutionary duty, they all voted for a soft-spoken peanut farmer who was systematically humiliated from his earliest days in office until what seemed his very last.”
― Wiley Cash, When Ghosts Come Home

“He shuffled to the door and didn’t look back. In his memory she would remain there forever, in her scarlet robe, surrounded by the dusty feathers of dead birds.”
― M.E. Proctor, Elymore: The Savage Crown Series Book 1