Jim Thompson Quotes

Then he laughed and she laughed. And quivering with the movement of the train, the dead man seemed to laugh too.

What else is there to do but laugh and joke... how else can you bear up under the unbearable?

If we all had all we wanted to eat, we’d crap too much. We’d have inflation in the toilet paper industry.

I told her the world was full of nice people. I'd have hated to try to prove it to her, but I said it, anyway.

What smells good in the store may stink in the stewpot.

Anyone who deprived her of something she wanted deserved what he got.

There are things that have to be forgotten if you want to go on living.

A weed is a plant out of place. I find a hollyhock in my cornfield, and it’s a weed. I find it in my yard, and it’s a flower.

When life attains a crisis, man’s focus narrows. [...] The world becomes a stage of immediate concern, swept free of illusion.

I kissed her, a long hard kiss. Because baby didn't know it, but baby was dead, and in a way I couldn't have loved her more.

He had made personality a profession, created a career out of selling himself. And he could not stray far, or for long, from his self-made self.

Life is a bucket of shit with a barbed wire handle.

I found out long ago that the place where the law is apt to be abused the most is right around a courthouse.

You’ve got no time at all, but it seems like you’ve got forever. You’ve got nothing to do, but it seems like you’ve got everything…You make coffee and smoke a few cigarettes; and the hands of the clock have gone crazy on you. They haven’t moved hardly, they’ve hardly budged out of the place you last saw them, but they’ve measured off a half? two-thirds? of your life. You’ve got forever, but that’s no time at all.

Practically every fella that breaks the law has a danged good reason, to his own way of thinking, which makes every case exceptional, not just one or two. Take you, for example.