Jim Thompson (writer)

“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.”

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

“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.”

“That was the way one had to do. To do the best one could, and accept things as they were. Usually, they did not seem so bad after a while; if they were not actually good, then they became so by virtue of the many things that were worse. Almost everything was relatively good. Eating was better than starving, living better than dying.”

“There was too much of a sameness about the evening’s delights. He had been the same route too many times. He’d been there before, so double-damned often, and however you traveled—backward, forward, or walking on your hands—you always got to the same place. You got nowhere, in other words, and each trip took a little more out of you.”

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

“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 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.”

“Sure there’s a hell... It is the drab desert where the sun sheds neither warmth nor light and Habit force-feeds senile Desire. It is the place here mortal Want dwells with immortal Necessity, and the night becomes hideous with the groans of one and the ecstatic shrieks of the other. Yes, there is a hell, my boy, and you do not have to dig for it.”

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