Jim Thompson (writer)

"What smells good in the store may stink in the stewpot."

"Then he laughed and she laughed. And quivering with the movement of the train, the dead man seemed to laugh too."

"I told her the world was full of nice people. Id have hated to try to prove it to her, but I said it, anyway."

"That was the way one had to do. To do the best one could, and accept things as they were. Usually, they did not seem so bad after a while; if they were not actually good, then they became so by virtue of the many things that were worse. Almost everything was relatively good. Eating was better than starving, living better than dying."

"He had made personality a profession, created a career out of selling himself. And he could not stray far, or for long, from his self-made self."

"She wasnt 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."