James Sallis

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

“You're not very good at this, are you?''At what I do, I'm the best. This isn't what I do.”

“My old man was eighty-six per cent white bread and a hundred per cent asshole.”

“Driver had the keys bunched in his hand, one braced and protruding between second and third fingers. Stepping directly forward, he punched his fist at alpha dog's windpipe, feeling the key tear through layers of flesh, looking down as he lay gasping for air.”

“Something radically new, the producer tells me. Think Virginia Woolf with dead bodies and car chases.”

“That you're Borges.' Manny laughed. 'Of course you are, you dumb shit. That's the whole point.”

“Everything’s interesting. You just have to look closely.”“And most people don’t.”

“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.”

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

“My mother by then had already begun her own decline, her own transformation, hardening into a bitter rind of a woman who pushed through the stations of her day as though each moment were unpleasant duty; as though the currencies of joy had become so inflated they could no longer purchase anything of worth.”

“He drove. That was what he did. What he’d always do.”

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

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

“He existed a step or two to one side of the common world, largely out of sight, a shadow, all but invisible. Whatever he owned, either he could hoist it on his back and lug it along or he could walk away from it. Anonymity was the thing he loved most about the city, being a part of it and apart from it at the same time.”

“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.”

“Maybe he should turn around. Go back and tell them that’s what life was, a long series of things that didn’t go down the way you thought they would.Hell with it. Either they’d figure it out or they wouldn’t. Most people never did.”

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

“The whole city was a compass. How could anyone ever have gotten so hopelessly lost here?”

“I was coming up on a cross street when a man wearing a filthy suit stepped out from around the corner of the building ahead and directly into my path. Bent with age, he turned bleak red eyes to me and stared. Pressed with his chest to both hands he carried a paperback book as soiled and bereft as his suit. Are you one of the real ones or not? he demanded. And after a moment, when I failed to answer, he walked on, resuming his sotto voce conversation. A chill passed through me. Somehow, indefinably, I felt, felt with the kind of baffled, tacit understanding that we have in dreams , that I had just glimpsed one possible future self. ”

“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. ”