Jim Thomsen

“In so many places around the country gentrification is a slow process. You watch communities change over time. In New Jersey, you drive in a neighborhood for the first time in a month and the whole thing is different. It’s gentrification with a bulldozer.”
― Stanton McCaffery, Neighborhood of Dead Ends

“The connective tissue between large Texas cities is brown nothingness. Buildings sprout from the flat ground in the distance when you get close enough to a city, their tallest structures reaching up to the sky like the blocky dark fingers of some buried giant from an alien race, but before you get there, the only thing around you is dirt, a few weathered shrubs, and an endless blue sky that sometimes makes you think it’s close enough to shatter if you throw a big rock at it. It’s like whichever deity was in charge of the terrain just gave up and copied and pasted the same mile over and over again all the way along I-10.”
― Gabino Iglesias, The Devil Takes You 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

“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