Jim Thomsen

“This is the part in the movie where Jade’s supposed to rally, she knows. She’s not supposed to mope, she’s supposed to be gearing up, pouring black powder into lightbulbs, hammering nails into the business end of a bat, that kind of stuff.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, My Heart Is a Chainsaw

“She tried to imagine marriage, as she had as a girl at St. Clerans, her family’s estate in Ireland, covering her eyes with a veil and dream-walking the grounds as a fairy-girl bride, but she quickly came to: There was always present the vortex of a darker past, what had been done to her and Jack as children, what they had done to each other as adults, and would probably, even against their will, do to each other again. In Barcelona they met again. They talked of Regina Le Clery, his friend who had just died in a plane crash at Orly Airport, and again of her mother, killed in a car crash in 1969, who managed her father’s many transgressions ably, like a deposed queen burying a broken heart; and they talked of ghosts, memories that lace the eye; and he fell asleep fingering the pearls, once her mother’s, she wore that night to bed; and following him to France, she discovered he had slept with another woman.”
― Sam Wasson, The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood

“He was looking like he felt quite sorry for himself, but happily so, and found a waiter to order more drinks from. He asked for a gin and tonic with those same elaborate instructions he had tried giving in Marianne’s earlier. It had to do with lemon wedges.”
― Dwyer Murphy, The Stolen Coast

“Cassie once overheard a well-known mystery writer pontificate from his corner bar stool in Missoula, attempting to woo a young female grad student. The author, who looked like a cross between a buffalo and a walrus, said, “In Missoula if you throw a stick you’ll hit a goddam writer. I wish more people would throw sticks.”
― C.J. Box, Treasure State