Quotes from Walter Mosley

A lot of people love their hate. They live to hate the people wronged them. You cain't just have one gang. That don't even make sense. If you took away the white man's black man or the black man's white man, most of 'em wouldn't even know how to walk down the street right.

Your people have lost the vision and vitality of your ancestors (73).

Not for the first time in my life I had made it to the top. For some reason this made me hanker for a chili dog with chopped onions under a blanket of processed American cheese.

I couldn't see why it shouldn't be my one hundred dollars.

But most Americans cannot comprehend the scrutiny that black people have been under since the days we were dragged here in bondage. Those two cops felt fully authorized to stop us with no reason and no warrant. They felt that they could question us and search us and cart us off to jail if there was the slightest flaw in how we explained our business. Even

THE EMERGENCY ROOM at any hospital in the middle of the night is mainly made up of the consequences of love.

I was an American citizen too; a citizen who had to watch his step, a citizen who had to distrust the police and the government, public opinion, and even the history taught in schools. It was odd that such negative thoughts would invigorate me. But knowing the truth, no matter how bad it was, gave you some chance, a little bit of an edge.

Time is like a river," Coydog had told the boy. "It come up behind ya hard and just keep right on goin'. You couldn't stop it no more than you could fly away.

If Satan played bingo in hell, I had just gotten my final winning/losing number.

mortality is a living critique of the divine

Asking a Southern woman for plain hospitality was like winking at a leprechaun: She had to give up her pot of gold no matter what.

No, no, no, no, no. Not at all. People take jobs they don't want, stay in marriages they hate, pay taxes for things they don't wanna do, and live among people they don't like. They love their enemies and hate their friends, break their promises and forget about bein' happy altogether.

But all of those things were possible back then even though nobody

It's hard for a man to understand a woman because a man just desires her; but women, most of them anyway, desire desire.

But Socco, Mustafa Ali said. If there ain't no black people really and they ain't no white people then how come you still usin' them words? Because them words still usin' me, brother Ali. They usin' me like a mothahfuckah.

And one day it hit me—the perfection imagined by socialist theory was impossible for human beings to attain. The philosophy was right but we were poor vessels for it.

looking for that sweet oblivion that all young men, white and black, thought could save them from the greater darkness that dogged their heels.

The great man say that life is pain," Coydog had said over eighty-five years before. "That mean if you love life, then you love the hurt come along wit' it. Now, if that ain't the blues, I don't know what is.

nighttime is kind on the eyes.

Why did you need to see my ID?" "This is an exclusive service, Mr. Orlean," she said with no chink of humanity in her face. "And we like to know exactly who it is we're dealing with." "Oh," I said. "So it wasn't because of my clothes or my race?" "The lower races come in all colors, Mr. Orlean. And none of them get back here.

Making friends has always been hard for me.

Men are weak, Mr. Rawlins. They're strong of arm but frail in their hearts. They need forgiveness more than women do.

It's a disheartening feeling when you can't stand the touch of someone but neither can you push them away.

Of course, I always knew that there was no real difference between the races, but still, it was nice to see an example of that equality.