Walter Mosley

I don__ give a fuck what you__e trying to do or what you want. I__ send your ass away if you were a white man with a red ribbon tied around your dick.

I wondered if I could just drop the role I carried like a mantle of a dethroned prince.

The girl was cinnamon colored in the way of Native America after it had been raped by Europe.

Kit [Carson Kitteridge] watched me for a few moments before saying, "That was some impressive killing you did. Naked too.""I hope I didn't embarrass Office Palmer.""She said that after all she heard about you she thought your johnson would be bigger.""Tell her that the air conditioner was on.

There are as many kinds of love as there are flowers and bugs put together but men and women and their needs are all the same.

That__ how Ptolemy imagined the disposition of his memories, his thoughts: they were still his, still in the range of his thinking, but they were, many and most of them, locked on the other side a closed door that he__ lost the key for. So his memory became like secrets held away from his own mind. But these secrets were noisy things; they babbled and muttered behind the door, and so if he listened closely he might catch a snatch of something he once knew well.

That's how powerful you are, girl...You pretty, but pretty alone is not what people see. You the kinda pretty, the kinda beauty, that's like a mirror. Men and women see themselves in you, only now they so beautiful that they can't bear to see you go.

I destroyed that doll, hoping the sacrifice would somehow reverse time and bring my father back. I was a mad scientist and an angry child.

It's like a door open at the side of the house and this cool breeze is blowing in over the back of my neck. The breeze is Death whispering and that door is open for me to go through anytime I want. And I want to go through. I want the confusion to stop--no, not only confusion but pain too.

I think that the power over death and life is the greatest strength that any person can have. It trumps sex and wealth. If I'm willing to die no one can master me.

The life most of us live are lives we are forced to live by immediate needs, influences, and pressures.

We born dyin'...But you ask a man an' he talk like he gonna live forevah.

Mrs. Turner gripped my baby finger.It's amazing how a man can feel sex anywhere on his body.

Freedom is a state of mind, I said wondering where I'd heard it before, not a state of being. We are all slaves to gravity and morality and the vicissitudes of nature. Our genes govern us much more than we'd like to think. Our bodies can not know absolute freedom but our minds can, can at least try.

Blood may be thicker than water, but family has them both beat.

These short stories are vast structures existing mostly in the subconscious of our cultural history. They will live with the reader long after the words have been translated into ideas and dreams. That's because a good short story crosses the borders of our nations and our prejudices and our beliefs. A good short story asks a question that can't be answered in simple terms. And even if we come up with some understanding, years later, while glancing out of a window, the story still has the potential to return, to alter right there in our mind and change everything.

A man's bookcase will tell you everything you'll ever need to know about him.

Chirren is the most dangerous creatures on the earth, with the exception of young girls between the ages of fifteen and forty-two.