Quotes from James Lee Burke

If we get scared enough we can convince ourselves that snake and nape are selective, and that a scarlet cross painted on a shield can make acceptable the beheadings of Saracens on a scaffold in Jerusalem.

In a half hour I could kick open a furnace door and fling into the flames all the snakes and squeaking bats that lived inside me. Except the next morning they would writhe with new life in the ashes and come back home, stinking and hungry.

The men and women who protected them and would one day live in Valhalla required no recompense other than their own self-respect.

No one had to convince me about the reality of hell. It wasn't a fiery pit. It lived and thrived in the human breast and consumed its host from night to morning.

He knows things don't happen in order, like past, present, and future.

He wavin' at you, Dave. Hey, it's that drunk man done fell in the bayou the ot'er night. That man must surely love water.

Penelope Balangie's tom-toms. For a minute or two I thought my magic twanger was shifting into overdrive.

Your knowledge and mine won't go away. But you've got to look at it for what it is. You can't bury something awful inside yourself, then pretend it's not there while you fight another war that makes you break all your own rules.

But as John Steinbeck had said long ago, we had come to fear a man with a hole in his shoe.

How do you get mad at a man who speaks in Petrarchan sonnets?

There is no equal to poor white trash when they get their hands on a Bible.

The air was bright with a clean, cold smell like dark water dipped out of a rain barrel in winter, perhaps a harbinger that the gifts of the earth are many, all of them waiting to be discovered.

Instead, he lived inside his loneliness

According to legend, he had worn elegant clothes and spoken Parisian French and had his land and wealth stolen from him by carpetbaggers after the war.

For some reason, each moment I spent with him made me feel that I had been diminished.

This piece of land was our original sin, except we had found no baptismal rite to expunge it from our lives.

They seemed to have the coloration and texture of the rubber in a pencil eraser. They

A woman opened the back door. She wore a black suit and hose; her hair was black, too, pulled straight back, her skin the color of paste, her eyes dark and luminous, as though she had a fever. "I'm Emmeline.

Her hair smelled like the Caribbean.

The art world is controlled by a handful of people in New York. Most of them are idiots who think a screened-in piece of ham swarming with flies constitutes expression. There are many fraudulent aspects to American life, but the art world is probably the most egregious.

Maybe he would come back one day. Or maybe not. Back then, people had a way of walking down a tar road and crossing through a pool of heat and disappearing forever.

IN THE DARWINIAN world of American high school culture, I had learned only one lesson: The lights of love and pity often died early, and many friendships were based on necessity and emotional dependency and nothing else.

IN MY OPINION, one of the great follies in the world is to put yourself inside the head of dysfunctional people. The mistake we usually make is to assume there is a rationale for their behavior. In most cases, there is none.

and I set it on the night table. I feared for Clete. I was protected by the culture of law enforcement, one that is ferociously tribal in nature. Clete was a disgraced cop, a lone soul sowing destruction and chaos everywhere he went, and hated by the Mob and NOPD. I felt his eyes on the side of my face.