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0052554
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He was part of this river of cars, aiding its sluggish tide and in turn aided by it. Without losing his identity, free to turn out of the tide when he chose, he still belonged to something.
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Jim Thompson |
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f709ec5
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Flight is many things. Something clean and swift, like a bird skimming across the sky. Or something filthy and crawling; a series of crablike movements through figurative and literal slime, a process of creeping ahead, jumping sideways, running backward. It is sleeping in fields and river bottoms. It is bellying for miles along an irrigation ditch. It is back roads, spur railroad lines, the tailgate of a wildcat truck, a stolen car and a d..
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Jim Thompson |
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6a04b56
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That's what she keeps you around for, to diddle her fiddle. Because you're low-hung and she's high-strung!
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Jim Thompson |
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de4ca42
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When life attains a crisis, man's focus narrows.
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Jim Thompson |
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fc43a2d
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I finished the ale, started to order a third one, and decided against it. I'd had enough. More than enough. Or I never would have. You take just so much from a bottle, and then you stop taking. From then on you're putting.
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Jim Thompson |
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3cd7f32
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In lots of books I read, the writer seems to go haywire every time he reaches a high point. He'll start leaving out punctuation and running his words together and babble about stars flashing and sinking into a deep dreamless sea. And you can't figure out whether the hero's laying his girl or a cornerstone. I guess that kind of crap is supposed to be pretty deep stuff--a lot of the book reviewers eat it up, I notice. But the way I see it is,..
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Jim Thompson |
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3f7acf8
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You've got no time at all, but it seems like you've got forever. You've got nothing to do, but it seems like you've got everything. You make coffee and smoke a few cigarettes: and the hands of the clock have gone crazy on you. They haven't moved hardly, they've hardly budged out of the place you last saw them, but they've measured off a half? two-thirds? of your life. You've got forever, but that's no time at all. You've got forever; and so..
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Jim Thompson |
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4b38746
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It's--it's always lightest j-just before the dark.
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Jim Thompson |
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0101c85
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You can't stamp on a man's corns when he's got his feet cut off.
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Jim Thompson |
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12ceafc
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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 warmth nor light and Habit force-feeds senile Desire. It is the place here mortal Want dwells with immortal Necessity, and the night becomes hideous with the groans of one and the ecstatic shrieks of the other. Yes, there is a hell, my boy, and yo..
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Jim Thompson |
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2eb0e37
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Dad always said that he had enough trouble sorting the fiction out of so-called facts, without reading fiction. He always said that science was already too muddled without trying to make it jibe with religion. He said those things, but he also said that science itself could be a religion, that a broad mind was always in danger of becoming narrow.
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Jim Thompson |
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a605749
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I'd forgotten about it, and now I forgot it again. There are things that have to be forgotten if you want to go on living.
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forgotten
living
memories
past
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Jim Thompson |
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aceccf4
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You've got forever, but that's no time at all. You've got forever; and somehow you can't do much with it. You've got forever; and it's a mile wide and an inch deep and full of alligators.
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forever
life
trapped
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Jim Thompson |
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48aad59
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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, now why is the silly bastard doing that? He looks fairly bright, about as bright as anyone else. Why the hell does he do that for living? You kind grin and look down your nose at him. You think he's nuts, know what I mean, or he doesn't have ..
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fiction
noir
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Jim Thompson |
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2231761
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He kept his back turned and his eyes closed, feeling no shame or anger but only an increasing sickness of soul.
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Jim Thompson |
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65b2501
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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 whose seeds are invariably planted earlier, in under or over-protectiveness, in a distrust in parental authority which becomes all authority. It can later, with maturity - a flexible concept - be laughed away, dispelled by determined clear think..
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Jim Thompson |
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f044c7f
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Dzhonni, otkuda ty znaesh', kakoi ia? Razve chelovek mozhet byt' uveren v tom, chto znaet chto-to? Malysh, my zhivem v zabavnom mire, v svoeobraznoi tsivilizatsii. V etom mire politseiskie stanoviatsia prokhodimtsami, a prokhodimtsy vypolniaiut ikh obiazannosti. Politiki stanoviatsia propovednikami, a propovedniki - politikami. Nalogovye inspektory sobiraiut nalogi dlia sebia. Plokhie liudi khotiat, chtoby u nas bylo bol'she deneg, a khoros..
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Jim Thompson |
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8463a33
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She wasn't much over five feet and a hundred pounds, and she looked a little scrawny around the neck and ankles. But that was all right. It was perfectly all right. The good Lord had known just where to put that flesh where it would really do some good.
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curvy
flesh
lord
scrawny
woman
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Jim Thompson |
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abe11f4
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Yeah, Johnnie,' I said, 'it's a screwed up, bitched up world, and I'm afraid it's going to stay that way. And I'll tell you why. Because no one, almost no one, sees anything wrong with it. They can't see that things are screwed up, so they're not worried about it. What they're worried about is guys like you. 'They're worried about guys liking a drink and taking it. Guys getting a piece of tail without paying a preacher for it. Guys who know..
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Jim Thompson |
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1976638
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If I had to marry someone, it wouldn't be a bossy little gal with a tongue like barbed-wire and a mind about as narrow.
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bossy
marriage
narrow-minded
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Jim Thompson |
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5241f70
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I knew-though I didn't recognize the fact-that I wasn't all right.
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murderer
psychopath
serial-killer
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Jim Thompson |
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0569609
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Wildly, he declared that she was a whore at heart, that she had always been a whore, that she had been one when he met her. That was not true. In her early working life, as a photographer's model and cocktail waitress, she had occasionally given herself to men and received gifts in return. But it wasn't the same as whoring. She had liked the men involved. What she gave them was given freely, without bargaining, as were their gifts to her.
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Jim Thompson |
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19fe529
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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 wouldn't be as loud as you want to scream, when you're at the bottom of the pit and the whole world's at the top, when it has but one face, a face without eyes or ears, and yet it watches and listens.... What are you going to do and say? Why, par..
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Jim Thompson |
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a2614c4
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I sat down in a booth, and the waitress shoved a menu in front of me. There wasn't anything on it that sounded good, and anyway, one look at her and my stomach turned flipflops... Every goddamned restaurant I go to, it's always the same way... They'll have some old bag on the payroll -- I figure they keep her locked up in the mop closet until they see me coming. And they'll doll her up in the dirtiest goddamned apron they can find and smear..
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fiction
noir
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Jim Thompson |
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c0c9d04
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I found out long ago that the place where the law is apt to be abused the most is right around a courthouse.
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Jim Thompson |
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3238939
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I just learned two things there at that college, Mr. Ford, that was ever of any use to me. One was that I couldn't do any worse than the people that were in the saddle, so maybe I'd better try pulling 'em down and riding myself. The other was a definition I got out of the agronomy book, and I reckon it was even more important than the first. It did more to revise my thinking, if I'd really done any thinking up until that time. Before that I..
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Jim Thompson |
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7c818e3
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Maybe it don't seem to make sense for a fella to be doing things for a reason that he don't know about. But I reckon I've been doing it most of my life.
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Jim Thompson |
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9e5a1db
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What smells good in the store may stink in the stewpot.
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Jim Thompson |
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09379cc
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I yawned and I stretched. I sure was needing some sleep, but I guess I'm always in need of sleep like I'm always in need of food. Because my labors were mighty ones--ol' Hercules didn't know what hard work was--and what is there to do but eat and sleep? And when you're eatin' and sleepin' you don't have to fret about things you can't do nothing about. And what else is there to do but laugh an' joke...how else can you bear up under the unbea..
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Jim Thompson |
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c3a10e8
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Clinton sighed, and gave up. All his life he had given up. He didn't know why it was like that; why a man who wanted nothing but to live honestly and industriously and usefully - who, briefly, asked only the privileges of giving and helping - had had to compromise and surrender at every turn. But that was the way it had been, and that apparently was the way it was to be.
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Jim Thompson |
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21dc1db
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The land, now, well I'll tell you how I feel about that. It's done a good job, as good as it was able to, anyway, and it's got a right to look tired. It'd be pretty upsetting if it looked any other way. Yes, and the hardness is all right, too. It's been through something pretty hard, and some of that hardness was bound to rub off. And sometimes a frown sets a lot better with you than a smile. Something that's taken a beating, you don't want..
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Jim Thompson |
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3392315
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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 law did not protect them; for them it was merely an instrument of harassment, a means of moving them on when it was against their interest to move, or detaining them where it was to their disadvantage to stay.
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Jim Thompson |
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de29869
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Strolling down a white-graveled walk to the cliff above the ocean, he let his eyes rove aimlessly over the expanse of sea and sand: The icy-looking whitecaps, the blinking, faraway sails of boats, the sweeping, constantly searching gulls. Desolation. Eternal, infinite. Like Dostoevski's conception of eternity, a fly circling about a privy, the few signs of life only emphasized the loneliness.
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Jim Thompson |
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4f60087
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Judging by her reaction (and what else was there to judge by?) he had managed the interview very well.
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Jim Thompson |
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cad752e
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He had to hate them, to move the smothering shroud of hatred from himself to them. He closed the door of his room behind him, and almost snatched the drink from under the bed.
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Jim Thompson |
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599f4c7
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ethicalities aside,
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Jim Thompson |
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9551984
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No me atreveria a decir que te equivocas, aunque tampoco podria darte la razon.
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novela-negra
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Jim Thompson |
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a3cbfa1
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her neat sweet features fixed in a small smile of polite wariness.
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Jim Thompson |