Quotes from Walter Mosley

I know how bad a thing it is to be a slave and I know how terrible it was but I don't believe that there's a free person in the whole world that knows how good a cup full of water can taste. Because you have to be a deprived slave, to be kept waiting for your water like we were to really appreciate how good just one swallow can be. When we finally got a drop on our tongues it was like something straight from the hands of the Almighty.

You have made Commerce a god that weighs on humanity like a twenty-four-pound boil on a man's back (117-118)

I find books in used-book stores, chain and independent stores, on friends' shelves and being read by some woman sitting opposite me on the subway. I find books the way a cow finds a new pasture, by looking to see where the other cows are headed.

They want to hold on to you and your people. They have isolated the ones who might grow powerful and overthrow their debauched reign.

He said that a men's work cloths are the only real cloths he has.

The person who controls history controls their fate. The man who can tell you what happened, or did not happen, is lord and master of all he surveys.

Any seed or insect or lizard or mammal that found itself in LA had to believe that there was a chance to thrive. Living in Southern California was like waking up in a children's book titled Would Be If I Could Be.

It was mid-November 2008. There were pirates taking ships with impunity in African waters, terrorists punching holes in Indian security, China sinking towards depression because Americans were afraid to buy cheap goods for Christmas, and the richest nation in the history of the world was talking about how to keep a budget.

I don't give a fuck what you're trying to do or what you want. I'd send your ass away if you were a white man with a red ribbon tied around your dick.

The girl was cinnamon colored in the way of Native America after it had been raped by Europe.

Maybe that's what they're afraid of. Maybe they don't want these children to make up their own minds. Maybe if they did that, the world would change.

Ain't no shame in bein' a grocer but it's bitch and a half if they think that that's all you're good for.

My father once told me that a great man walks the back roads. He does what's right every day and no one knows it but those lucky enough to be loved by him.

If you want to write believable fiction, you will have to cross over the line of your self-restraint and revel in the words and ideas that you would never express in your everyday life.

We will be one step down from the Creator, she said, her olive-hued face tightening into an expression that she considered dramatic. Imagining a world and then making it.

I think it's some kind of meeting of energies that causes what we see, and that part of those energies emanate from our lifeforces, our minds.

Kit [Carson Kitteridge] watched me for a few moments before saying, That was some impressive killing you did. Naked too. I hope I didn't embarrass Office Palmer. She said that after all she heard about you she thought your johnson would be bigger. Tell her that the air conditioner was on.

It's the strongest love that makes the greatest treachery. The worst thing you can say to somebody is that you will be there no matter what and then fail to show.

My heart was beating like it was being played by a one-armed Japanese Ondekoza drummer pounding slowly on his seven-hundred-pound drum with a caveman's club at twilight.

I thought I recognized him but most cops blended into one brutal fist for me after a while.

But at night we began dreaming of Man's perfect world without humanity (57)

A man can live his whole life following the rules set down by happenstance and the cash-coated bait of security-cosseted morality; an entire lifetime and in the end he wouldn't have done one thing to be proud of.

You can't fight with death, all you can do is stand your ground and hope that the foundation don't fall out from under you.

I destroyed that doll, hoping the sacrifice would somehow reverse time and bring my father back. I was a mad scientist and an angry child.