Quotes from James Lee Burke

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WHEN ISHMAEL WOKE, the walls of his trench were seeping water and the dawn was colder than it should have been, the sky an unnatural and ubiquitous pale color that had less to do with the rising of the sun than the passing of the night.

his motor control still functioned but his soul went somewhere else.

PEOPLE WHO ARE unknowledgeable about agriculture often refer to farm labor as unskilled. Take bucking bales. Try inserting your fingers inside the twine on ninety pounds of compacted grass after it has been rained on, then flinging it up on the flatbed of a truck and repeating the process every four minutes for eight hours. If you want to up the ante, do it in an electric storm.

The sky was purple, streaked with fire, the palm trees like scorched tin cutouts against the sun. I woke at four in the morning and could not sleep again, my heart congealed with a sense of mortality that I could not explain.

Edwin Arlington Robinson once wrote that God slays Himself with every leaf that flies. I think the same is true of us. I think we cannot understand ourselves until we understand that living is a form of dying. My generation was born during the Great Depression and, for good or bad, will probably be the last generation to remember traditional America. Our deaths may be inconsequential; the fling we had was not.

The wind becomes your indispensable ally. When the trees and undergrowth and sometimes the elephant grass begin to thrash, the object that does not move or the shadow that remains like a tin cutout becomes the entity that is out there in the darkness, preparing to take your life. Except in this case, the presence on

The party is a grand one and infinite in nature and like the music of the spheres thunderous in its presence, and I realized finally that the invitation to it comes with the sunrise and a clear eye and a good heart and the knowledge that we're already inside eternity and need not fear any longer.

I feel myself drifting off to sleep. Do you have those moments when you surrender your worries and let go of the earth and float away to a place where the stars look like a highway of crushed ice? It's a safe place, in all probability the womb, surrounded by the humming of your mother's blood, a cloak that is invulnerable. That's where I find myself now.

We are the sum total of what we have done and where we have been

drug and alcohol addiction are joined at the hip with clinical depression and psychoneurotic anxiety.

In Montana I knew a twenty-one-year-old kid who killed two people before he got to prison, then killed or helped kill five more during a riot. He had to be awakened from a sound sleep the afternoon of his execution. The

just another gargoyle that took up temporary residence in Danny Boy's dreams and went away. "Some people say insomnia is a disorder.

In the world of the very rich, obtuseness may not quite rise to the level of a virtue, but it's often the norm.

Mortality is not kind, and do not let anyone tell you it is.

We're wayfaring strangers. We're born alone, we die alone.

God, don't let me be an old fool, I prayed.

Like many my age, I believe people in groups are to be feared and that arguing with others is folly and the knowledge of one generation cannot be passed down to the next.

At some point in your life, you have to give up anger or it will destroy your spirit the way cancer destroys living tissue.

spent the rest of the afternoon in my room. A faucet was ticking in the bathroom as loudly as a mechanical clock, with the same sense of urgency and waste. I tried to tighten the

speculation on the nature of creation is a luxury reserved for scholars. The rest of us have to deal with one another and ferret our way through the snares and pitfalls that we create for our fellow man.

Two kinds of cops eat their gun: the corrupt ones and the ones who let the dead lay claim upon the quick.

At heart they were secular Calvinists and believed their fellow man was born in a degraded state; consequently, they oversaw atrocities with equanimity and substituted pragmatism for compassion and slept the sleep of the dead.

We all know that the survivors of war rarely speak of their experience. We tell ourselves they do not want to relive the horror of the battlefield. I think the greater reason for their reticence lies in their charity, because they know that the average person cannot deal with the images of a straw village worked over by a Gatling gun or Zippo-tracks, or women and children