Neal Wilson > Neal's Quotes

“She had a way about her that spoke of homemade bread, and caring for people, and the kind of patience that women have when they help a ewe birth a lamb, or stay up in the night with a baby calf bawling for its momma.”
― James Aura, When Saigon Surrendered: A Kentucky Mystery

“You will curl your lip and want to spit. But I don't care. A man can carry something like this inside him for only so long. Then it's got to come out.”
― James Aura, When Saigon Surrendered: A Kentucky Mystery

“Here's the deal with women. You provide the food, shelter and money and she provides you with gratitude and sex. Isn’t that how it works?” -Tommy Gabbert”
― James Aura, When Saigon Surrendered: A Kentucky Mystery

“We sat like store mannequins, not moving a muscle, following it with our eyes. I looked for something to kill it with, but there was nothing.
-Russell Ray Teague”
― James Aura, When Saigon Surrendered: A Kentucky Mystery

“She's a charming middle-aged lady with a face like a bucket of mud and if she has washed her hair since Coolidge's second term I'll eat my spare tyre, rim and all.”
― Raymond Chandler

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
― Mark Twain

“When I got to the truck, the dream-woman, the nurse was lying on the seat. She was sobbing. Well, I felt like I'd had about enough excitement for one night.”
― James Aura, When Saigon Surrendered: A Kentucky Mystery

“Do you hate people?”

“I don't hate them...I just feel better when they're not around.”
― Charles Bukowski, Barfly

“There is no absolute beginning to any story, after all. There is only the moment you begin watching.”
― William Landay, Mission Flats: A Novel

“I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano

“Life turns on a dime. Sometimes towards us, but more often it spins away, flirting and flashing as it goes: so long, honey, it was good while it lasted, wasn’t it?”
― Stephen King, 11/22/63

“Our editor, Harry Combs did not suffer fools gladly, although he insisted we cater to the fools that read the newspaper.”
― James Aura, The Cumberland Killers: A Kentucky Mystery

“First came the wail of a siren across the valley, and then because light travels faster than blood, we saw an explosion, and a second later we felt it and heard the ear-splitting blast.”
― James Aura, The Cumberland Killers: A Kentucky Mystery

“I decided I would not sell this farm if the Devil himself promised me pretty girls, fame, or all the money in the world.”
― James Aura, When Saigon Surrendered: A Kentucky Mystery

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.”
― Mark Twain

“If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery--isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is.”
― Charles Bukowski, What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire

“We focused our attention on the tall businessman. His rhetoric did not soar. Even his voice was gray; bleak like a dead possum in melting, muddy snow.”
― James Aura, The Cumberland Killers: A Kentucky Mystery

“Russell, the gallant knight, with sureness of spirit and the smile of the gods, was carrying the woman who raised
him into the rainy night. I was Paladin, Tristan and King David.”
― James Aura, When Saigon Surrendered: A Kentucky Mystery

“You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“Chris didn’t need to learn how to conquer fear. He had to embrace it, walk with it and listen to it.”
― Michelle Tackabery, Within Your Reach: A Journey Through Diabetes

“Actually, writers have no business writing about their own works. They either wax conceited, saying things like: 'My brilliance is possibly most apparent in my dazzling short story, "The Cookiepants Hypotenuse."' Or else they get unbearably cutesy: 'My cat Ootsywootums has given me all my best ideas, hasn't oo, squeezums?”
― Connie Willis, The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories

“We all lived for money, and that is what we died for.”
― William T. Vollmann, No Immediate Danger: Volume One of Carbon Ideologies

“It is never too late to be what you might have been.”
― George Eliot

“Finch was his own country, the government unstable, the population volatile.”
― Kealan Patrick Burke, Kin

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“That is the definition of faith, hermano," says Figueroa. "Something that we believe in even though it doesn't work."
Eres un cinicio."
If it worked, it would be science.”
― John Sayles, Los Gusanos

“The only difference between dancing and fucking," he said in those days, "is that you don't fuck in front of a live band.”
― John Sayles, Los Gusanos

“Humans have one foot in the jungle and one foot on Mars.”
― James Aura, The Hurricane Code

“Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us still each one its special radiance.”
― Marcel Proust

“Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time