Down the River Unto the Sea Quotes

“A man can live his whole life following the rules set down by happenstance and the cash-coated bait of security-cosseted morality; an entire lifetime and in the end he wouldn’t have done one thing to be proud of.”
― Walter Mosley, Down the River Unto the Sea

“When I was a kid,” I said, “I thought that if I worried about every way I could possibly die, then none of them would happen and I’d live forever.”
― Walter Mosley, Down the River Unto the Sea

“One thing I had learned in high school was that in sports you always had to move in a direction that your opponent did not expect. From Ping-Pong to prizefighting, the man with the unexpected moves was the player most likely to win.”
― Walter Mosley, Down the River Unto the Sea

“The law is a flexible thing—on both sides of the line—influenced by circumstance, character, and, of course, wealth or lack of same.”
― Walter Mosley, Down the River Unto the Sea

“He put the dollar in his breast pocket and stood. I followed him up the stairs and out into a fate filled with madmen and red birds, nameless cops and women who fooled you again and again.”
― Walter Mosley, Down the River Unto the Sea

“Ever since Reagan busted the unions, both sides of Congress have become lackeys to the rich. They all get made, paid, and laid out of the picked pockets of men like me.”
― Walter Mosley, Down the River Unto the Sea

“I couldn’t repair my career. I couldn’t achieve a reprieve for A Free Man. All I had was the truth and the certainty that I had to do something about that truth. If that meant breaking the law, I was ready. If it meant missing my child’s graduation, that would have to be.”
― Walter Mosley, Down the River Unto the Sea

“Anything one man does that another man understands can be defined as language,”
― Walter Mosley, Down the River Unto the Sea

“I liked meeting young black Republicans. It meant that some part of the younger generation was thinking. Who cared if they were wrong?”
― Walter Mosley, Down the River Unto the Sea

“I like dogs. If some evolutionist had told me that men had descended from canines I would have believed her. All the brotherly passion, fang-baring hunt lust, and fear I feel on a daily basis I see in dogs.”
― Walter Mosley, Down the River Unto the Sea

“I like the rules; following them proves to me that I’m a civilized man.”
― Walter Mosley, Down the River Unto the Sea

“Women didn’t necessarily need good men to excite them. What they needed, and most men needed too, was somebody who understood their desires and their fears—not necessarily in that order.”
― Walter Mosley, Down the River Unto the Sea

“Anything one man does that another man understands can be defined as language”
― Walter Mosley, Down the River Unto the Sea

“A man can live his whole life following the rules set down by happenstance and the cash-coated bait of security-cosseted morality; an entire lifetime and in the end he wouldn’t have done one thing to be proud of.”
― Walter Mosley, Down the River Unto the Sea

“was born to be an investigator. For me it was like putting together a three-dimensional, naturalistic puzzle that in the end would be an exact representation of the real world. From the deep bottom”
― Walter Mosley, Down the River Unto the Sea

“I could imagine a life in a world maybe a hundred years from now where my ideas and some man’s might be the same.”
― Walter Mosley, Down the River Unto the Sea

“America was changing at a snail’s pace in a high wind, but until that gastropod mollusk reached its destination I had a .45 in my pocket and eyes on all four corners at once.”
― Walter Mosley, Down the River Unto the Sea

“That modern law in the United States was based on economic class and what the popular opinion classified as evil,”
― Walter Mosley, Down the River Unto the Sea

“Willa was wearing a blue dress reminding me of the femme fatale of one of my favorite novels.”
― Walter Mosley, Down the River Unto the Sea

“Human connection only reminded me of what I could lose.”
― Walter Mosley, Down the River Unto the Sea