Quotes from Walter Mosley

Le donne sono serissime quando devono dare un bacio, gli diceva Coy. Ridono per tutto il tempo, ma quando arriva il momento del bacio sono come un gatto che vede qualcosa muoversi nell'erba alta.

Anything one man does that another man understands can be defined as language

I found out a lot about my father as he regaled my wife. He'd learned how to be a potter in a small village in Bolivia. There, working on a kick-wheel in a shack the size of an outhouse, he started thinking about the few novels he'd read.

I ate with them and slept with them, and I killed enough blue-eyed young men to know that they were just as afraid to die as I was.

Techno-anarcho-terrorism

THE AFTERNOON PASSED quietly enough. I logged onto the BBC website and perused the world, starting in Africa. I always start there, looking to see what the news providers of American TV didn't deem important.

often think of how so many people have walked into my life for just a few minutes and kicked up some dust, then they're gone away.

I inhaled deeply, feeling of two minds about the benefits and detriments of smoking. On one hand, tobacco robbed me of my wind, but on the other, it gave me something to do while the devil was tempting me!

A job in a factory is an awful lot like working on a plantation in the South. The bosses see all the workers like they're children, and everyone knows how lazy children are.

I wore death on my shoulder like a superheroes cape, but that didn't matter. I was going to fight the good fight and, win or lose, I'd be counted as a man who struggled against his own fate.

Two of the deacons were just boys. I guess they had to join a gang one way or another, and the church won out.

If the river were whiskey and I was a diving duck . . .

there was enough trouble in my trough; I'd save the reeducation of the white race for sometime later in the week.

Black men of our day were never told , the skies the limit. Our limits were more like the inner lid of a coffin.

That modern law in the United States was based on economic class and what the popular opinion classified as evil

I could imagine a life in a world maybe a hundred years from now where my ideas and some man's might be the same.

I went out of the front door without answering because all I had in my lungs was a scream.

I became aware of recorded piano music. The composition had no style to it. It wasn't jazz or classical or even elevator covers of pop tunes—just notes strung together in tight mathematical patterns with no heart.

What's that got to do with a few gray hairs?" Angelo wanted to know. "Girl see one or two and she thinks maybe the man done aged enough to calm down, make somethin' outta himself. She willin' to let him look so maybe she could see what his prospects are like. That way a man like me might get a great night or a lifetime of pot roasts, fat babies, and halfhearted regrets.

I always talk about down home like it really was home. Like everybody who looked like me and talked like me really cared about me. I knew that life was hard, but I hoped that if someone stole from me it would be because they were hungry and needed it. But some people will tear you down just to see you fall. They'll do it even if your loss is their own.

There are ten thousand perfectly good reasons not to have children but hearing the love in Feather's voice trumped every one.

I seen it all," old Coydog used to say, "but that don't mean I seen everything.

Some people live according to love and being loved—if only a little.

Her voice was somewhere in the lower register of gold.