James Carlos Blake Quotes

Sex and violence ... are the two great engines of the world.

~ James Carlos Blake

Men tend to remember the best things about the women they've loved and to forget the worst, which is why so many men make the same mistakes with women again and again. Women tend to forget the best things about the men they've loved and to remember the worst, which is why so many women become bitter about men.

~ James Carlos Blake

He would know a number of grown women in his life who did not possess even a small portion of the grace his middle sister owned at the age of fourteen.

~ James Carlos Blake

Aspiring novelists should be taught that the old adage, “Write about what you know,” isn’t limited to what you have personally experienced. Vicarious experience is also a great part of what you know. Read a lot of history and it becomes part of your store of knowledge, part of what you’re prepared to write about. The same goes for stories and memories that other people share with you.

~ James Carlos Blake

One of the greatest of human follies is that we think we know ourselves so well, that we know how we would act under any conditions, that we would under any circumstance 'do the right thing.' Well, as many have discovered, you don't really know what you'll do in the dark till the lights go out.

~ James Carlos Blake

The only things you can ever truly own cannot be bought with money.

~ James Carlos Blake

Some of us are always in the borderlands no matter where we might be on the map.

~ James Carlos Blake

History is a record of human nature in action.

~ James Carlos Blake

Pride has traditionally been regarded as the foremost of the Seven Deadly Sins, but it has rather obviously been overtaken by Greed.

~ James Carlos Blake

We don't permit anyone to tell us our business, nor do we wish to tell anyone his. The same goes for moral outlooks. Don't tread on us and we won't on you. We're a tolerant, liberty-loving bunch, we Wolfes.

~ James Carlos Blake

Every single time it was grand. I loved the moment when you announce the stickup and everything suddenly goes brighter and sharper and the world seems to spin faster. You show them the gun and say hand it over and there's no telling what's going to happen in the next tick of the clock.

~ James Carlos Blake

The notion that we've made vast moral progress and are now a less violent species is belied by our awesome powers of destruction, our military might, police forces as well-armed as soldiers. Without the threat of such violent force behind it, all law would be meaningless. I prefer stories that remind us of that. At its core, history is a story of violence at work. It all comes down to the old saw that, however much you can gain with a kind word, you can gain more with a kind word and a gun.

~ James Carlos Blake

He finally comprehended that the sole impossibility regarding human sorrow is to arrive at some unsurpassable limit to it.

~ James Carlos Blake

You do not tell people to go fuck themselves and then later when you're in trouble ask them to help you.

~ James Carlos Blake

When you make a deal you stick to it. Rock-hard rule. You don't renege, you don't sell out. You hold up your end and expect the other party to do the same. If the other party doesn't, you're entitled to deal with every man of it as you see fit in order to set things right. No--you're more than entitled. You're obligated. Or the rule would mean nothing.

~ James Carlos Blake

The greatest tragedy that can befall a man is never to know who he really is.

~ James Carlos Blake

If the devil ever raised a garden, the Everglades was it.

~ James Carlos Blake

A man who can laugh at himself is truly blessed, for he will never lack for amusement.

~ James Carlos Blake

I mean to tell you, the Law's notion of justice is more cold-blooded than any outlaw I ever knew. And I mean 'outlaw,' not criminal. 'Criminal' doesn't distinguish between guys like men and the guys who own the banks and insurance companies and stock markets, who own the factories and coal mines and oil fields, who own the goddamn Law. I once said to John that being an outlaw was about the only way left for a man to hold on to his self-respect, and he said Ain't that the sad truth. The girls laughed along with us because they knew it wasn't a joke.... John got the publicity because he loved it ... he carried on like the whole thing was an adventure movie and he was Douglas Fairbanks. He wanted to to be a 'star.' That's how he was. Not me. I never even liked having my picture taken. All I ever wanted was to show the bastards who own the law that it didn't mean they owned me.

~ James Carlos Blake

They loved the sea. They taught themselves to sail, to navigate and read the weather. Without their mother's knowledge and long before she thought them old enough to sail outside the harbor, they were piloting their catboat all the way to the Isles of Shoals. They were on the return leg of one such excursion when the fickle weather of early spring took an abrupt turn and the sky darkened and the sun vanished and the wind came squalling off the open sea. They were a half mile from the harbor when the storm overtook them. The rain struck in a slashing torrent and the swells hove them so high they felt they might be sent flying--then dropped them into troughs so deep they could see nothing but walls of water the color of iron. They feared the sail would be ripped away. Samuel Thomas wrestled the tiller and John Roger bailed in a frenzy and both were wide-eyed with euphoric terror as time and again they were nearly capsized before at last making the harbor. When they got home and Mary Margaret saw their sodden state she scolded them for dunces and wondered aloud how they could do so well in their schooling when they didn't have sense enough to get out of the rain.

~ James Carlos Blake

The moon grew plump and pale as a peeled apple, waned into the passing nights, then showed itself again as a thin silver crescent in the twilit western sky. The shed of leaves became a cascade of red and gold and after a time the trees stood skeletal against a sky of weathered tin. The land lay bled of its colors. The nights lengthened, went darker, brightened in their clustered stars. The chilled air smelled of woodsmoke, of distances and passing time. Frost glimmered on the morning fields. Crows called across the pewter afternoons. The first hard freeze cast the countryside in ice and trees split open with sounds like whipcracks. Came a snow flurry one night and then a heavy falling the next day, and that evening the land lay white and still under a high ivory moon.

~ James Carlos Blake

Just because it's a world of thieves out there don't mean there ain't no rules to it.

~ James Carlos Blake

Without the right to defend yourself--and the right to possesss the means to do it--all other supposed rights are so much hot air.

~ James Carlos Blake