91 Quotes by Jim Thompson

They had no hope of anything more, no comprehension that there might be anything more. In a sense they were an autonomous body, functioning within a society which was organized to grind them down. The law did not protect them; for them it was merely an instrument of harassment, a means of moving them on when it was against their interest to move, or detaining them where it was to their disadvantage to stay.

I’d forgotten about it, and now I forgot it again. There are things that have to be forgotten if you want to go on living.

He was thinking that the cities, perhaps, needed to look into the future even more than the country did. They should look ahead for forty, eighty, one hundred and sixty years, to a strong and healthy plain of population – or to an overworked, weakened, underfed, and infertile desert.

If we all had what we wanted to eat... We’d have inflation in the toilet paper industry.

You don’t need proof, know what I mean? Not from what I’ve seen of the law in operation. All you need is a tip that a guy is guilty. From then on, unless he’s a big shot, it’s just a matter of making him admit it.

That’s what she keeps you around for, to diddle her fiddle. Because you’re low-hung and she’s high-strung!

I’d been chasing females all my life, not paying no mind to the fact that whatever’s got tail at one end has teeth at the other, and now I was getting chomped.

How to make her run? No problem there. For a fearful shadow lies constantly over the residents of Uneasy Street. It casts itself through the ostensibly friendly handshake, or the gorgeously wrapped package. It beams out from the baby’s carriage, the barber’s chair, the beauty parlor. Every neighbor is suspect, every outsider, every period; even one’s own husband or wife of sweetheart. There is no ease on Uneasy Street. The longer one’s tenancy, the more untenable it becomes.

I figure sometimes that maybe that’s why we don’t make as much progress as other parts of the nation. People lose so much time from their jobs in lynching other people, and they spend so much money on rope and kerosene and getting likkered-up in advance and other essentials, that there ain’t an awful lot of money or man-hours left for practical purposes.