36 Quotes by James Sallis

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.

Find beauty, try to understand, survive.

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

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.

Much later, as he sat with his back against an inside wall of a Motel 6 just north of Phoenix, watching the pool of blood lap toward him, Driver would wonder whether he had made a terrible mistake. Later still, of course, there’d be no doubt. But for now Driver is, as they say, in the moment. And the moment includes this blood lapping toward him, the pressure of dawn’s late light at windows and door, traffic sounds from the interstate nearby, the sound of someone weeping in the next room.

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

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

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

Closure is for jars, books, and closet doors.