Quotes from James Sallis

We're professionals. People make deals, they need to stick to them. That's the way it works, if it's going to work at all.

Father, the dark moths crouch at the sills of the earth, waiting.

I drive. That's what I do. All I do.

That you're Borges.' Manny laughed. 'Of course you are, you dumb shit. That's the whole point.

My old man was eighty-six per cent white bread and a hundred per cent asshole.

Here we raise his children for him, cook for him, bring up his crops, butcher his hogs - even fight his wars for him - and he still won't acknowledge our existence.

Closure is for jars, books, and closet doors.

Eu dirijo. É tudo o que eu faço. Não fico sentado enquanto você planeja a coisa ou a prepara. Você me diz onde começamos, em que direção devemos ir, para onde devemos seguir depois, em que horário. não me meto, não conheço ninguém, não ando armado. Eu dirijo.

It was nine o'clock, cloudy, and a little like one of those science fiction movies where a few survivors are clinging to the wreckage, living out their days in the dry husk of civilization.

Anxiety. Dissociation. The words came easily. We attach them to processes, they migrate to the people themselves, and we think: Now I understand. But we don't, and the words themselves interdict further attempts to do so. Maryanne

I once read a story by this guy named Harlan Ellison ending: That night it rained, everywhere in the known universe. I was never too sure what the ending meant in terms of Ellison's story, but anyone who sits alone in a motel room for hours, watching the rain wash the world away, begins to understand. Knows what it feels like.

Things of the world try to connect. Prodigal rain issues from a sky into which trees rise like pleading hands. Days bear us lightly across the face of the world as every year the ground pulls harder, recalling like a spurned lover, ever more fixedly, how much it wants us.

Some brainless comedy where actors with perfect white teeth spoke their lines then froze in place to let the laugh track unwind.

Still cool out by the cabin when I reached it, early-morning sunlight skipping bright coins across the lake.

memory will cut you off at the knees if you let it.

This is what people are talking about when they use words like grace. That moment, that morning, came vividly back to him whenever he thought of it. But soon suspicion set in. He understood well enough that life by very definition is upset, movement, agitation.

All stories are ghost stories, about things lost, people, memories, home, passion, youth, about things struggling to be seen, to be accepted by the living.

We can make up for our actions. But for our inactions, what we fail to do ...

You're an unpopular man. Memorable-but remarkably unpopular. You have no friends, for instance, in Brooklyn. Around Henry Street, say, where old women sit on the stoops in their aprons and men play dominoes on cardtables by the curb.

He wasn't much, mind you—just family

Six a.m., first light of dawn, world stitching itself back together out there, reconstituting itself, as he looked on. Blink, and the warehouse across the way reemerged. Blink again, the city loomed in the distance, a ship coming hard into port.

Fine's a town I don't even visit anymore.

What she looked, Driver thought, was completely comfortable with herself, a quality uncommon enough anywhere, and one so remarkable in trendy, self-reinventive L.A., as to appear truly subversive.

Bright Segment" -that's it. If I'm our lives we have one or two of those, one or two bright segments, Doc thought, we're fortunate. Most don't. And the rest wasn't silence, like that opera, I Pagliacci, said. The rest was just noise.