Quotes from Joe R. Lansdale

These fucks next door. I got no problems with them yet, but I feel one brewing, way they watch me. They're biding their time. I'd like to have you at my back, and there's always the chance they'll get you first, instead of me. I like the idea of a buffer.

Off they went down the highway, the taillights fading, the song dying, the black metal of the car melting into the fabric of night, and then there was only the whispery sound of good tires on wet cement and finally not even that. Just the blowing sound of the wind and the rain.

Under the covers we danced the good, slow dance, and she let loose with that laugh I loved so much, the one as sweet and happy as the song of a bird. And I did not care to remember then that even the most predatory of birds, the shrike, can sing.

Doctors and nurses saved me from the big, dark plunge, and I didn't thank Jesus when I came around. I thanked the medical staff, their years of schooling, their tremendous skills. I always figured if I was a doctor and I saved some person's life, and the first thing they said when they came around was "Thank Jesus," I would have wanted to stick a pair of forceps up their ass and tell them to see if Jesus could yank those out for them.

Sometimes he felt as if he had stepped into an alternate universe where the old laws of nature and what was right and wrong did not apply.

I come to think on that watch some more, and it come to me that God wasn't all loving. He was like a big watchmaker, and we were the innards of his watch, and this here earth we stand on is the watch's slippery surface. Once God got the watch made, set it ticking, he sat back and said, 'Well, good luck to you son of a bitches, cause I'm done.

Let me explain, let me go into what we in the mathematics business like to call one big ole fucking goddamn shit-eating hypothesis

Some things you do, not because they're pleasant, but because they have to be done.

But killing a man ought to mean something, even if you have to do it.

In polite society what you say to an attractive woman who is dressed in a way that makes you understand the power of biology is, "You look nice.

It makes you less ignorant to actually know what you're talking about, so listen to me.

Hap, even tough I'm a racist castrating bitch that wants you to be better than you are, wants you to do something with your life besides be a knockabout, do you think you could find it in your heart, in your itty-bitty white man's dick, to get a hard-on for me? In other words, want to fuck?

I didn't suspect the day Grandfather came out and got me and my sister, Lula, and hauled us off toward the ferry that I'd soon end up with worse things happening than had already come upon us or that I'd take up with a gun-shooting dwarf, the son of a slave, and a big angry hog, let alone find true love and kill someone, but that's exactly how it was.

Certainly there were gars in there that had bitten children and pulled swimming dogs under for their afternoon meals. They didn't call the big ones alligator gar for nothing. Six feet long, lean and vicious, they were the barracudas of fresh water, beasts with angry racial memories of lost prehistoric seas. And

For when you can't live life, you're just burning life, sucking air and making turds. Perhaps it's not age, but health that matters. Live long and healthy, it doesn't matter. But live long and unhealthy, it's a living hell. And here I lie. Not doing well at all. Only the past seems to matter now; only it seems to be alive; only it can support my soul.

The heat moved across the morning like an invisible truck, heavy and crushing, and with a hotter engine than the day before.

Old age and death were as wild and improbable as some drunken story about walking across the face of a star.

Marvin: – La necrofilia ce l'abbiamo sepolta dentro. Uno dei miei libri, Storia della tortura e della morte, parla delle atrocità che abbiamo commesso in nome della giustizia e della vendetta. Spesso erano peggiori dei crimini originali. L'uomo è un animale sanguinario.

Leonard, you're my hero. When I grow up I want to be just like you. Can I, huh, can I?" "Need some black paint first, but that isn't gonna make you as pretty. And it would be nice if you were a lot less stupid.

I'm going to say my name is Dorothy Sherman and I'm telling it like it is. I'm going to say my friends call me Dot, and I prefer my enemies not to call me at all.

Noi non giudichiamo. Le cose strane sono il nostro mestiere.

A raccoon could have been trained to do better than I was doing, though it would have to be a smart raccoon.

I don't get it," Raul said. "Why all this macho?" "When I say act like a man," Leonard said, "I mean act honorably and with courage. Macho has been turned into a bad word by turds who act like beasts, not men.

Problem with this world is we've lost the idea of shame and guilt. We need a little of that. No one thinks they ever do bad anymore. They just do different.