36 Quotes by James Sallis

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.

Every day we reconstruct ourselves out of the salvage of our yesterdays.

Perhaps after all, for all our talk of change, redemption or personal growth, for all our dependence on therapists, religious faith or mood-altering drugs both legal and non, we're doomed simply to go on repeating the same patterns over and over in our lives, dressing them up in different clothes like children at play so we can pretend we don't recognize them when we look into mirrors.

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.

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

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

What are any of our lives but the shapes we force them into. Memory doesn't come to us of its own; we go after it, pull it into sunlight and make of it what we need, what we're driven towards, what we imagine, changing the world again and again with each new quarry, each descent, each morning.

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.

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.