Quotes from James Sallis

Bright Segment" -that's it. If in 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.

I never found out exactly what it was that had hurt my friend so–something working in him a long time, that finally found purchase. In future years I'd come to recognize similar things scrabbling for footholds within myself. They were already there, of course, even then. Sometimes at night I heard them breathing.

We live in snow globes, don't we? Pick them up, shake them, years swirl about us and settle.

Get Carter remains among the great crime novels, a lean, muscular portrait of a man stumbling along the hard edge - toward redemption. Ted Lewis cuts to the bone.

Life sends us messages all the time - then sits around laughing over how we're not gonna be able to figure them out.

Time went by, which is what time does, what it is.

Truth is, of course, relative. But then, so is relative.

The dam of my eyes broke, and tears flooded the land.

Maybe he should turn around. Go back and tell them that's what life was, a long series of things that didn't go down the way you thought they would. Hell with it. Either they'd figure it out or they wouldn't. Most people never did.

He existed a step or two to one side of the common world, largely out of sight, a shadow, all but invisible. Whatever he owned, either he could hoist it on his back and lug it along or he could walk away from it. Anonymity was the thing he loved most about the city, being a part of it and apart from it at the same time.

In the darkness things always go away from you. Memory holds you down while regret and sorrow kick hell out of you. The only help you'll get is a few hard drinks and morning.

Mostly what you lose with time, in memory, is the specificity of things, their exact sequence. It all runs together, becomes a watery soup. Portmanteau days, imploded years. Like a bad actor, memory always goes for effect, abjuring motivation, consistency, good sense.

In my junior year I discovered books. . . . Devoured [them] the way other kids did candy or sandwiches, spent days hunched over . . . my spine an oversized question mark.

Find beauty, try to understand, survive.

We aren't angels. Angels couldn't breathe the air down here. They'd die.

Time went by, which is what time does, what it is.

Everything's interesting. You just have to look closely." "And most people don't.

Bombs fall and wipe out civilization as we know it, two things come up out of the ashes: roaches and F-150s.

Drinking also maroons you without provisions on the island of self. Like most other promises it makes, alcohol's vow of kinship, that it will bridge your life to others, smooth the way, proves false. Fooled again: you're alone.

What'd you need? Desuetude. Reading again, are we? Could be dangerous. It means to become unaccustomed to. As in something gets discontinued, falls into disuse. Thanks, man. That it? Yeah, but we should grab a drink sometime.

You're not very good at this, are you?' 'At what I do, I'm the best. This isn't what I do.

My mother by then had already begun her own decline, her own transformation, hardening into a bitter rind of a woman who pushed through the stations of her day as though each moment were unpleasant duty; as though the currencies of joy had become so inflated they could no longer purchase anything of worth.

The whole city was a compass. How could anyone ever have gotten so hopelessly lost here?

Think we choose our lives? No. But I don't think they're thrust upon us, either. What it feels like to me is, they're forever seeping up under our feet.