Quotes from James Lee Burke

People who commit suicide in a dramatic fashion often have an agenda and are involved in a fantasy that leads to their death. They're filled with rage and seek revenge against those who have hurt them. They slash their wrists or jump from buildings or fire bullets into their brain. In their fantasy, they witness the discovery of their body by people they hate. In that way, they leave behind a legacy of guilt and sorrow.

was learning that when you get close to death, you'll trade everything you own for one more day on earth.

Whenever I hear and see a politician or a military leader, a bank of American flags at his back, trying to convince us of the rightness of a policy or a deed that will cause harm to others; when I am almost convinced myself that setting humanitarian concern in abeyance can be justified in the interest of a greater good, I pause and ask myself what my brain-smoked friends would have to say.

I'm looking out at the desert and thinking of you. I don't know why.

Certain kinds of loss are forever. Not many people understand that.

Don't live in tomorrow's problems.

Hackberry tried to convince himself that Collins was dead, his body long ago eaten by coyotes or lost inside the bowels of the earth. Regardless, Hackberry told himself, Collins belonged in the past or the place in the collective unconscious where most demons had their origins. If evil was actually a separate and self-sustaining entity, he thought, its manifestation was in the nationalistic wars that not only produced the greatest suffering but always became lionized as patriotic events.

Emmeline seemed to lie the way all narcissists do. Whatever they say, regardless of its absurdity, becomes the truth.

Life's a sonofabitch, then you die.

Don't borrow trouble.

cryptic profundity

IF YOU ARE a parent, you know the following to be true: Even though your child has grown into adulthood, you never see the man or the woman; you see only the little boy or the little girl.

I had grown weary of federal agents and wiseguys, narcs and stings and brain-fried lowlifes, and all the seriousness and pretense we invest in the province of moral invalids.

If age brings either wisdom or answers to ancient questions, it has made an exception for me.

Chief Joseph already said it. "The place where I go is the place where I will be.

Here's the strange thing about death. At a certain age it's always with you, lurking in the shade, pulling at your ankles, whispering in your ear when you pass a crypt. But it doesn't get your real attention until you find yourself alone at home and the wind swells inside the rooms and stresses the joists and lets you know what silence and solitude are all about.

The degeneracy of a mob has no equal. It combines the mentality of the bigot, the coward, the sadist and the molester and the rapist. If there is an exception, I've yet to see it. I would love to line up a few of the participants in my sights.

Either way, it was a grand afternoon, one that presaged an even better evening and access to all the fruits the world had to offer.

It's strange how people bloom, even in poisonous soil, once they allow themselves to become what they've always been.

We're living in weird times, Streak. I bet forty percent of the country wouldn't mind firing up the ovens as long as the smokestacks are blowing downwind.

believe long ago had decided it was better to be first in Gaul rather than second in Rome.

Nobody ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of the American public.

It's an affliction that contaminates our vision of the world and invades the heart and the mind and the soul. It's origins are always the same: the sudden recognition that you are unloved or, worse, that you are unworthy of love. When that happens, you sail your ship alone, with no harbor lights in sight and no companion except the wind.

He was riding back through a doorway in time to a place that had nothing to do with the airplanes, and motorized vehicle and telephones wires, and radios that surrounded him now....... The woods in late autumn had become his private sun dappled cathedral, one that contained presences antithetical to the conventional notion of a church.