Top 40 Jim Thompson Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “There is only one plot-things are not what they seem.”

— Jim Thompson

2. “There are things that have to be forgotten if you want to go on living.”

— Jim Thompson

3. “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.”

— Jim Thompson

4. “A weed is a plant out of place.’ Let me repeat that. A weed is a plant out of place.’ I find a hollyhock in my cornfield, and it’s a weed. I find it in my yard, and it’s a flower.”

— Jim Thompson

5. “It doesn’t matter what answers you get if you ask the wrong questions.”

— Jim Thompson

6. “Friends can help each other. A true friend is someone who lets you have total freedom to be yourself – and especially to feel. Or, not feel. Whatever you happen to be feeling at the moment is fine with them. That’s what real love amounts to – letting a person be what he really is.”

— Jim Thompson

7. “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.”

— Jim Thompson

8. “A weed is a plant out of place.”

— Jim Thompson

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

— Jim Thompson

10. “There are thirty-two ways to write a story, and I’ve used every one, but there is only one plot – things are not as they seem.”

— Jim Thompson

11. “The world was a shitpot with a barbed-wire handle and the further he could kick it the better he liked it.”

— Jim Thompson

12. “It was like being asleep when you were awake and awake when you were asleep. I’d pinch myself, figuratively speaking – I had to keep pinching myself. Then I’d wake up kind of in reverse; I’d go back to the nightmare I had to live in. And everything would be clear and reasonable.”

— Jim Thompson

13. “As for working with a partner, he didn’t like that either. It cut the score right down the middle. It put an apple on your head, and handed the other guy a shotgun. Because grifters, it seemed, suffered an irresistible urge to beat their colleagues. There was little glory in whipping a fool – hell, fools were made to be whipped. But to take a professional, even if it cost you in the long run, ah, that was something to polish your pride.”

— Jim Thompson

14. “But even the innocent blow of a child can be painful, possibly more so than that of an adult since its victim cannot bring himself to strike back. His only recourse, when the pain becomes unbearable, is to put himself beyond the child’s reach.”

— Jim Thompson

15. “I ain’t saying you’re a liar, because that wouldn’t be polite. But I’ll tell you this, ma’am. If I loved liars, I’d hug you to death.”

— Jim Thompson

16. “How to make her run? No problem there. For a fearful shadow lies constantly over the residents of Uneasy Street. It casts itself through the ostensibly friendly handshake, or the gorgeously wrapped package. It beams out from the baby’s carriage, the barber’s chair, the beauty parlor. Every neighbor is suspect, every outsider, every period; even one’s own husband or wife of sweetheart. There is no ease on Uneasy Street. The longer one’s tenancy, the more untenable it becomes.”

— Jim Thompson

17. “You go into the office and take a book or two from the shelves. You read a few lines, like your life depended on reading ’em right. But you know your life doesn’t depend on anything that makes sense, and you wonder where in the hell you got the idea it did; and you begin to get sore.”

— Jim Thompson

18. “What I was thinking was that she must have buggers in her bloomers or a chigger on her figger, or however you say it. It looked to me like something had better be done about it pretty quick, or her pants would start blazing and maybe they’d set the fairgrounds on fire and there’d be a panic with thousands of people getting stomped to death, not to mention the property damage. And I couldn’t think of but one way to prevent it.”

— Jim Thompson

19. “I kissed her, a long hard kiss. Because baby didn’t know it, but baby was dead, and in a way I couldn’t have loved her more.”

— Jim Thompson

20. “You don’t need proof, know what I mean? Not from what I’ve seen of the law in operation. All you need is a tip that a guy is guilty. From then on, unless he’s a big shot, it’s just a matter of making him admit it.”

— Jim Thompson

21. “It looked like I’d sold my pottage for a mess of afterbirth, as the saying is. I’d been chasing females all my life, not paying no mind to the fact that whatever’s got tail at one end has teeth at the other, and now I was getting chomped on.”

— Jim Thompson

22. “I told her the world was full of nice people. I’d have hated to try to prove it to her, but I said it, anyway.”

— Jim Thompson

23. “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.”

— Jim Thompson

24. “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.”

— Jim Thompson

25. “I found out long ago that the place where the law is apt to be abused the most is right around a courthouse.”

— Jim Thompson

26. “That’s what she keeps you around for, to diddle her fiddle. Because you’re low-hung and she’s high-strung!”

— Jim Thompson

27. “The phone rang. Softly, in actuality, yet it seemed loud and ominous, as phones do at night in dark hotel rooms.”

— Jim Thompson

28. “What smells good in the store may stink in the stewpot.”

— Jim Thompson

29. “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.”

— Jim Thompson

30. “You can’t stamp on a man’s corns when he’s got his feet cut off.”

— Jim Thompson

31. “I’d been chasing females all my life, not paying no mind to the fact that whatever’s got tail at one end has teeth at the other, and now I was getting chomped.”

— Jim Thompson

32. “When life attains a crisis, man’s focus narrows.”

— Jim Thompson

33. “Well, anyway, by the time it got ready to vote, it looked like a fella wouldn’t be able to have no fun at all anymore, if my opponents were elected. About all a fella would be able to do, without getting arrested, was to drink sody-pop and maybe kiss his wife. And no one liked the idea very much, the wives included.”

— Jim Thompson

34. “I figure sometimes that maybe that’s why we don’t make as much progress as other parts of the nation. People lose so much time from their jobs in lynching other people, and they spend so much money on rope and kerosene and getting likkered-up in advance and other essentials, that there ain’t an awful lot of money or man-hours left for practical purposes.”

— Jim Thompson

35. “I knew–though I didn’t recognize the fact–that I wasn’t all right.”

— Jim Thompson

36. “He was dignity distorted, bravery become knavery, sanctimoniousness masking sin. He was a mirror, jeering at the subject it reflected. Yet so muted were the jeers, so delicate the inaccuracies of delineation, that they evaded detection. True and false were blended together. The false was merely an extended shadow of the true.”

— Jim Thompson

37. “If we all had what we wanted to eat... We’d have inflation in the toilet paper industry.”

— Jim Thompson

38. “I rode a streetcar to the edge of the city limits, then I started to walk, swinging the old thumb whenever I saw a car coming.”

— Jim Thompson

39. “He was thinking that the cities, perhaps, needed to look into the future even more than the country did. They should look ahead for forty, eighty, one hundred and sixty years, to a strong and healthy plain of population – or to an overworked, weakened, underfed, and infertile desert.”

— Jim Thompson

40. “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.”

— Jim Thompson

41. “If the Good Lord made a mistake in us people it was in making us want to live when we’ve got the least excuse for it.”

— Jim Thompson

42. “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.”

— Jim Thompson

43. “Sure there’s a hell...”

— Jim Thompson

44. “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.”

— Jim Thompson

45. “Existence and proof are inseparables. You have to have the second to have the first. I.”

— Jim Thompson

46. “He’d had too much. He was too beaten. When they get that far gone, you’d better get in the final licks fast.”

— Jim Thompson