We rarely act from logic when facing the critical choices of our lives.
To all those adults who return home to repay the debt of childhood, and find they never really left. Listen while you still can.
The evil prosper, and the innocent pay the bills for them.
The Secret History.
Some stories must wait to be told. Any writer worth his salt knows this. Sometimes you wait for events to percolate in your subconscious until a deeper truth emerges; other times you’re simply waiting...
Sheriff Dennis lifts an Ole Miss coffee mug off the desk and spits tobacco juice into it. I like spitting on the Rebels, he says distractedly.
People say time be like a river. That’s bullshit. You can swim upstream and downstream in a river. Can you do that with time? Hell, no. Time ain’t no river. Time is a big fucking razor blade scraping...
Nothing was what you thought it was, because no one was who they pretended to be.
Man is the universe becoming conscious of itself.
I’m a big believer in first lines. If a writer doesn’t grab you with their first sentence, even in a literary novel, they might need to think about another line of work.
Because death is the end, and if a man doesn’t speak before it silences him, then the things he holds closest die with him.
Sleeve,
Notebooks.
County rescue boat to recover the corpse. Normally, I would
Blacks who had been dragging the city down for the past twenty years. Rusk and a few trusted friends referred to them as untouchables.
Because the beautiful way he speaks in public is just another cloak he wears to hide what lies beneath his skin,
You ever read American Tabloid, by James Ellroy?
While Sands's eyes flicker with private mirth, the evil that Tim hinted at fills my soul like a squid's ink.
We're all terrified by rattlesnakes, but the spider we brush off our sleeve with hardly a thought is far more likely to hurt us.
The thing about kicking open a door to the past is that sometimes what’s behind it comes out under its own power.