Quotes from Joe R. Lansdale

The projects looked like a place where dreams went to commit suicide and hope got screwed in the ass.

Breathing the air was like swallowing broken glass.

The whole thing made Bill lonely as the last pig in a slaughterhouse line.

Family breathes for each other, and close family breathes as one.

I'm always ready," Leonard said. "They pulled me out of my mama, I was ready for lunch and a fistfight.

Whitey still has them on his farm, only they ain't doing nothing there and they're getting tidbits tossed to them like dogs, and they take it and keep on keeping on and wanting Whitey to do more." "Maybe Whitey owes them." "Maybe he does, but you can be a cur or you get up off your ass and start seeing yourself as a person instead of an underdog that's got to take those scraps.

Just a year ago I kept thinking this ain't fair, the way things have turned out for me. Then it come to me clean as spring rain. Life is just what it is, and it ain't fair at all." "Can't we make it fair?" "You can try, but all that other unfairness keeps seeping in.

Time is like that. Especially when you're young. It can fix a lot of things, and what it doesn't fix, you forget, or at least push back and only bring out at certain times, which is what I did, now and then, late at night, just before sleep claimed me.

poi, all'improvviso, la verità mi è saltata agli occhi, semplice come un bicchier d'acqua. La vita è quello che è, ed è tutto tranne che giusta.

We were in our broken-down Buick that had come from a time when cars were big and the American dream lay well within reach for just about anyone white and male and straight who wanted to reach for it. All others, take a number and wait.

To top things off nicely, it began to lightning in the east, stitching up the pit-black sky like a drunk seamstress with bright yellow thread.

It's a special state of mind. You know, like when you switch channels on TV, and surprise, it's your favorite movie just starting.

like a pack of wild Indians.

Killing ain't no good thing, son, unless it's to eat or protect yourself. And you ought never to delight in it.

I love him," Ella said. "I loved that shit-ass husband of mine, too," Brett said. "But one day I didn't and I had to set his head on fire.

He's dumb as a bag of fresh horseshit

I don't know it's such a good idea to dig up the past like an old grave. What's in it might stink.

It was my father's contention, and it's certainly mine, that hunting is not a sport. If the animals could shoot back, then it would be a sport. It is justifiable only for food, and for no other reason. After that, it's just killing for the sake of putting a lid on what still simmers deep in our primitive hearts.

In the morning light the land and trees and the surface of the river were the color of fresh blood.

All it takes now for us to know all the gory details about some murder is for it to be horrible, or it to be a slow news week, and it's everywhere, even if it's some grocery clerk murder in Maine that hasn't a thing to do with us.

In looking back on the novel, I can see a lot of things I would do differently now, but the truth of the matter is, rewriting old work does little more than dress it in new clothes, and sometimes you don't want that. You don't want to see some old guy out there in a speedo. Just doesn't look right. Also, something written with the energy of the moment and in its time makes it different than when you come back and coldly remodel it. It looses its original charm if it ever had any.

That first noggin shot I hit him so hard I bet his fuckin' dog back home shit a turd in the shape of a praying Jesus.

Daddy always said Grandpa was so tight that when he blinked the skin on his pecker rolled back.

Inside his head, a brain cell used a stepladder to find a high-shelved thought.