The Last Good Kiss Quotes

“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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, The Last Good Kiss

“Youth endures all things, kings and poetry and love. Everything but time.”
― James Crumley, 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, 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, The Last Good Kiss

“When even the bartenders lose their romantic notions, it's time for a better world.”
― James Crumley, 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, 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, The Last Good Kiss

“There’s no fool like a fool who thinks he’s charming. On”
― James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss

“Strange ladies draped in denim and satin, in silver and hammered gold. Ah, yes, the easy life, unencumbered by families or steady jobs or the knave responsibility. Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ else to lose, right, and the nightlife is the right life for me, just keep on keepin’ on. Having fun is the fifth drink in a new town or washing away a hangover with a hot shower and a cold, cold beer in a motel room or the salty road-tired taste of a hitch-hiking hippie-chick’s breast in the downy funk of her sleeping bag. Right on. The good times are hard times but they’re the only times I know.”
― James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss

“It’s the same in all the arts: as technology advances, humor declines. The limits and definitions of art disappear, then the art is forced to satirize itself too earnestly, and the visual arts become literary, and that, my friends, is the very first sign of cultural degeneracy.”
― James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss

“They say the gods watch over fools and drunks—surely Trahearne and I qualified—and whoever they are, they’re right too often for comfort.”
― James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss

“Dumb bastard’s bound to quit,” Trahearne said after we had driven nearly half a mile. Maybe that’s the definition of dumb bastards: they never quit.”
― James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss

“I remember true love.” “You mean the old days when you had to get engaged before you could show your girl’s ass to your buddies?”
― James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss

“La juventud lo aguanta todo: reyes bíblicos, poesía, amor... solo la vence el tiempo.”
― James Crumley, 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, The Last Good Kiss