Jim Thompson Quotes

Ethicalities aside,

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.

Her mind moved around and around the subject, moving with a kind of fuzzy firmness. With no coherent thought process, she arrived at a conviction - a habit with the basically insecure; an insecurity w...

If the Good Lord made a mistake in us people it was in making us want to live when we’ve got the least excuse for it.

I got a pole and fishing line from under my bed. I came back out of the bedroom and called to Myra, asking her if she could pack me up a lunch because I was going fishing. And I guess you know what sh...

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

It looked like I’d sold my pottage for a mess of afterbirth, as the saying is. I’d been chasing females all my life, not paying no mind to the fact that whatever’s got tail at one end has teeth at the...

Judging by her reaction (and what else was there to judge by?) he had managed the interview very well.

​Sure there's a hell... I could hear him saying it now, now, as I lay here on bed with her breath in my face, and her body squashed against me... It is the drab desert where the sun sheds neither warm...

He was dignity distorted, bravery become knavery, sanctimoniousness masking sin. He was a mirror, jeering at the subject it reflected. Yet so muted were the jeers, so delicate the inaccuracies of deli...

Did you ever think much about jobs? I mean, some of the jobs people land in? You see a guy giving haircuts to dogs, or maybe going along the curb with a shovel, scooping up horse manure. And you think...

It’s—it’s always lightest j-just before the dark.

How to make her run? No problem there. For a fearful shadow lies constantly over the residents of Uneasy Street. It casts itself through the ostensibly friendly handshake, or the gorgeously wrapped pa...

He picked her up and tossed her on the bed.They had a hell of a time.But afterward, after she had gone back to her own room, depression came to him and what had seemed like such a hell of a time becam...

But you could, Ken said. You could. We got a fella over in the jail right now for pleasurin’ a pig. Well, I’ll be dogged, I said, because I’d heard of things like that but I never had known of no actu...

It had soaked in on him at last, the spot he was in. Soaked clear through a quart of booze until it hit him where he lived and rubbed the place raw.

If I wasn't a decent woman I'd heist a leg and pee in your ear until it washed out that stinking pile of crap you call brains.

He was staring off across the long broad fields, raising his eyes above the red clay soil to the horizon, looking across the fiery-red plains of Hell with its endless gauntlet of dead-brown imps---the...

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...

Well. Well?What are you going to do? What are you going to say?What are you going to say when you’re drowning in your own dung and they keep booting you back into it, when all the screams in hell woul...