“When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.”
― James Crumley, quote from The Last Good Kiss
“...the sun rose each morning to stare into my face with the blank but touching gaze of a lovely retarded child.”
― James Crumley, quote from The Last Good Kiss
“Stories are like snapshots, pictures snatched out of time, with clean hard edges. But this was life, and life always begins and ends in a bloody muddle, womb to tomb, just one big mess, a can of worms left to rot in the sun.”
― James Crumley, quote from The Last Good Kiss
“I knew the men were probably terrible people who whistled at pretty girls, treated their wives like servants, and voted for Nixon every chance they got, but as far as I was concerned, they beat the hell out of a Volvo-load of liberals for hard work and good times.”
― James Crumley, quote from The Last Good Kiss
“I chuckled like Aldo Ray. If I had to endure his l'homme du monde act, he had to suffer my jaded alcoholic private eye.”
― James Crumley, quote from The Last Good Kiss
“I didn't know what was going on, didn't understand a bit of it, didn't like any of it. Maybe that's why the first thing I packed was my guns. If your brain won't work, wave a gun around. Sometimes that helps.”
― James Crumley, quote from The Last Good Kiss
“Nobody lives forever, nobody stays young long enough. My past seemed like so much excess baggage, my future a series of long goodbyes, my present an empty flask, the last good drink already bitter on my tongue.”
― James Crumley, quote from The Last Good Kiss
“Youth endures all things, kings and poetry and love. Everything but time.”
― James Crumley, quote from The Last Good Kiss
“There’s no fool like a fool who thinks he’s charming. On”
― James Crumley, quote from The Last Good Kiss
“Nobody lives forever, nobody stays young long enough. My past seemed like so much excess baggage, my future a series of long goodbyes, my present an empty flask, the last good drink already bitter on my tongue. She still loved Trahearne, still maintained her secret fidelity as if it were a miniature Japanese pine, as tiny and perfect as a porcelain cup, lost in the dark and tangled corner of a once-formal garden gone finally to seed.”
― James Crumley, quote from The Last Good Kiss
“When even the bartenders lose their romantic notions, it's time for a better world.”
― James Crumley, quote from The Last Good Kiss
“Sadness softened her nasal twang, that ubiquitous accent that had drifted out of the Appalachian hills and hollows, across the southern plains, across the southwestern deserts, insinuating itself all the way to the golden hills of California. But somewhere along the way, Rosie had picked up a gentler accent too, a fragrant voice more suited to whisper throaty, romantic words like Wisteria, or humid phrases like honeysuckle vine, her voice for gentleman callers. “Just fine,” she repeated. Even little displaced Okie girls grow up longing to be gone with some far better wind than that hot, cutting, dusty bite that’s blowing their daddy’s crops to hell and gone. I went to get her a beer, wishing it could be something finer.”
― James Crumley, quote from The Last Good Kiss
“Like too many men, Trahearne and I didn't know how to deal with a woman like [the girl], caught as we were between our own random lusts and a desire for faithful women so primitive and fierce that it must have been innate, atavistic, as uncontrollable as a bodily function. That was when I stopped being angry at the old man.”
― James Crumley, quote from The Last Good Kiss
“This was the place, the place I would have come on my own wandering binge, come here and lodged like a marble in a crack, this place, a haven for California Okies and exiled Texans, a home for country folk lately dispossessed, their eyes so empty of hope that they reflect hot, windy plains, spare, almost Biblical sweeps of horizon broken only by the spines of an orphaned rocking chair, and beyond this, clouded with rage, the reflections of orange groves and ax handles.”
― James Crumley, quote from The Last Good Kiss
James Crumley
Born place: in Missoula, Montana, The United States
Born date October 12, 1939
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“Beware the seduction of the quick conclusion. Do not indulge in the answer you desire until you know all you need to know.”
― Anthony Ryan, quote from Tower Lord
“So that the Universe felt love,
by which, as somebelieve,
the world has many times been turned to chaos.
And at that moment this ancient rock,
here and elsewhere, fell broken into pieces.”
― Dante Alighieri, quote from Helvetti
“That’s how I know it was really love, I guess,” he says, his words bringing my head back to level, my eyes right to him. He’s still lost in the stars. “When you want something for someone else more than you want them to be here for you—when you just wish they had more time, rather than more time with you. I’m pretty sure that’s love.”
― Ginger Scott, quote from The Girl I Was Before
“The draugr leaped up, surprisingly agile for a leather-bound skeleton. "The true champion would never have let Mjölnir slip from his grasp. You are an impostor, and I will put you in the earth, where you belong."
It was a great speech. The draugr even followed it up with a roar, ready to reinflate. Except ... well, the problem with battlefield speeches? If you're talking, you aren't fighting.
So when the draugr began to roar, he got it from all sides. An arrow in the back of the head. A wolf clamping down on his arm bone. And Matt running full speed and slamming him in the face with the shield.”
― K.L. Armstrong, quote from Odin's Ravens
“So he's tame,' said Estienne, and reached out tentatively, as though to pat a wild animal.
It was a question of which part of the animal he was patting. Damen cknocked his hand away. Estienne gave a yelp and snatched his hand back, nursing it against his chest.
'No that tame,' said Laurent.”
― C.S. Pacat, quote from Captive Prince: Volume One
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