205 Quotes by Walter Mosley

Angel, you got checkout girls in these here grocery stores cain’t feed their own kids right, jazz musicians workin’ for the post office because music don’t pay the charge of admission to a nightclub. You might love your work but one day you wake up and find that your work don’t love you.

It’s the strongest love that makes the greatest treachery. The worst thing you can say to somebody is that you will be there no matter what and then fail to show.

A lot of people love their hate. They live to hate the people wronged them. You cain’t just have one gang. That don’t even make sense. If you took away the white man’s black man or the black man’s white man, most of ’em wouldn’t even know how to walk down the street right.

Susan Straight finds LA’s secret heart in Between Heaven and Here and with a sleight of hand only the masters have, she creates an alley, a neighborhood, a history that is as rich and tragic as any Shakespearean tale.

This distinction was very important to him: His mother did love him but not enough to save him.

Sometimes you might forget who you are and where, but that’s okay because there’s always somebody around that’s happy to remind you.

If everybody in the world despises you and hates you, sees your features as ugly and simian, makes jokes about your ways of talking, calls you stupid and beneath contempt; if you have no history, no heroes, and no future where a hero might lead, then you might begin to hate yourself... And then one hot summer’s night you just erupt and go burning and shooting and nobody seems to know why.

I thought I recognized him but most cops blended into one brutal fist for me after a while.

Freedom for us has always been dangerous. Freedom for us has been a crime as far back as our oldest memories. And so whenever we’re feeling liberation we know that there’s somebody nearby with a rope and a collar, a shotgun and a curse.