Quotes from James Lee Burke

Did you ever see a mob rush across town to do a good deed?

The lack of expression in Detective Benbow was the kind you see in people who have witnessed events that forever change their view of the world. They never talk about it or struggle with it. Instead, they accept the fact that human beings are capable of deeds Satan couldn't think up.

The mystics may have found solace in the meditative life, but I think there are days when memory and solitude are not one's friend.

Women are the perfect creation. I don't care who hears that. Even before I hit puberty, they lived nightly in my dreams, and I have the feeling they'll live with me in the grave.

and made famous by Janis Joplin. It was one of despair and loss and unrelieved misery, one that maybe only a black woman of Thornton's era could adequately understand. The song was "Ball and Chain.

Sometimes the father poured a sack full of dry rice on the floor and made Clete kneel on the kernels until sunrise; sometimes he sat on the side of the bed and gently touched Clete's face with a hand that was as callused as a carpenter's; sometimes he lay down beside Clete and wept as a child would.

We don't care what people say, rock and roll is here to stay,'" he said. "That's from Danny and the Juniors, the greatest single line in the history of music.

The Great Whore of Babylon is a commanding mistress. Once she widens her thighs and takes you inside her, she never lets go.

and sometimes throwing your own

The collapse of the economy, the systemic spread of fear, the threat of imagined foreign adversaries would probably be enough to pull it off. But one way or another

She wondered if this were what hell was about. Not a place of punishment but of disparity. Those who had done nothing to earn their fate lived like this, while three miles away, others rode the Ferris wheel and children raised their hands joyfully to a hot-air balloon that rained down candy on their heads.

Louisiana is not a state; it's an outdoor mental asylum in which millions of people stay bombed most of their lives.

You've got a lot of anger in you, son," he said. "Don't let it turn on you. It'll flat tear you up.

reread James Street's Tap Roots and By Valour and Arms, Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind, MacKinlay Kantor's Andersonville, Bruce Catton's A Stillness at Appomattox, and all the works of Shelby Foote.

Maybe they used drugs on you. Maybe they didn't need drugs. They have powers we don't understand.

He had learned in Vietnam there were three groups of people who got you killed—pencil pushers, amateurs, and idealists.

The armies of the night are faceless and mindless and the modern equivalent of Visigoths, but when they have a leader, their time in history rolls around again.

There is a strange phenomenon among human beings to which most of us are susceptible. It's an affliction that contaminates our vision of the world and invades the heart and the mind and the soul. Its 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.

motivation may be no more complex than that of an angry child flinging scat because he was left with regularity in a dirty diaper.

THE SUN HAD just crested on the horizon like a misplaced planet, swollen and molten and red, lighting a landscape that seemed sculpted out of clay and soft stone and marked by the fossilized tracks of animals with no names, when a tall barefoot man wearing little more than rags dropped his horse's reins and eased himself off the horse's back and worked his way down an embankment into a riverbed chained with pools of water that glimmered as brightly as blood in the sunrise.

There is no more grand moment in a writer's life than typing the first sentence of a new book.

he had kept encased in glass hanging from an

Solitude and peace with oneself are probably the only preparation one has for death.

But a line sergeant told me something I never forgot. 'Don't think about it before it happens, and don't think about it when it's over.