36 Quotes by James Sallis

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.

Rina’s always claimed that I expect too little from life,” Standard said.“Then at least you’ll never be disappointed.

Why’d you call, boy? What did you want from me?""The company of a friend, I think.""Always a cheap treat.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.