Quotes from James Lee Burke

how many decisions did you make that at the time seemed inconsequential but down the track had enormous influence on either you or others?

I no longer care that my time on earth is coming to an end. What better way than in hot blood? Would you rather meet the grim reaper at Roncevaux or between bedsheets stiff with your own fluids?

His jaw went slack, the way an old man's does when his thought processes take him into blind alleys.

You know what death smells like? Fish blood that someone has buried in a garden of night-blooming flowers. Or a field mortuary during the monsoon season in a tropical country right after the power generators have failed. Or the buckets that the sugar-worker whores used to pour into the rain ditches behind their cribs on Sunday morning. If that odor comes to you on the wind or in your sleep, you tend to take special notice of your next sunrise.

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. Now they are surrounding my home, both the living and the dead.

I would start with four fingers of Jack in a thick mug, with a sweating Budweiser back, and by midnight I would be alone at the end of the bar, armed, drunk, and hunched over my glass, morally and psychologically insane.

I do not mean to assault anyone's sensibilities, but once you face death or reach out and touch it with your hand, or look into the half-lidded eyes of a woman or child or man whose life has been violently taken, you bond with them and silently try to console them for the theft of their lives. You promise to carry them in your heart and never tell anyone about it. I think that's what humanity is about.

I suspect the peak of Roland's life was the morning in the year 778 when he rode up Roncevaux Pass with Charlemagne in the thin air of the Pyrenees and realized he had unknowingly gone through the metaphysical eye of the needle. He had entered immortality, and from that moment on, death could lay no claim on him.

We get hurt worse by the people whom we care about. And they seldom mean to do it. That's what makes it so painful, kiddo.

I won't try to argue with your experience and what you've shaped out of it. But the world isn't a jail. We just make our own sometimes. Does that make any sense to you?

I'm not telling the troot, no?

When people make mistakes, there's usually a reason for it. These pork chops are something else." She knew at that moment that Hershel Pine was probably the best human being she'd ever known.

when it comes to understanding the mysteries of creation or the fact that light can enter the eye and form an image in the brain and send a poetic tendril down the arm into a clutch of fingers that could write the Shakespearean sonnets.

Those are props from a film we made about a serial killer." He gave me the title and named the actors and the directors. My head was throbbing. I couldn't process

For good or bad, my preoccupation with death and the past had defined much of my life, and a long time ago I had made my separate peace with the world and abandoned any claim on reason or normalcy or the golden mean. Waylon Jennings said it many years ago: I've always been crazy but it's kept me from going insane.

When a drunk gets eighty-sixed out of a bar, he's not supposed to buy drinks for the people still inside.

The gift of Morpheus brought not only sleep but oblivion.

Hackberry Holland's greatest fear was his fellow man's propensity to act collectively, in militaristic lockstep, under the banner of God and country. Mobs did not rush across town to do good deeds, and in Hackberry's view, there was no more odious taint on any social or political endeavor than universal approval.

caused him to drop his membership in the ACLU and join the National Rifle Association.

If you're poor and you commit a crime, the legal system works quickly and leaves you in pieces all over the highway. If you're educated and have money, the process becomes a drawn-out affair, like a terminal cancer patient who can afford various kinds of treatment all over the world. But eventually he ends up at Lourdes.

a circuitous way of spreading confusion without offering any information of value.

I'm tired of sackcloth and

There are events you witness, or in which you participate, that forever remain sacrosanct and inviolate in memory, no matter how painful that memory is, because of the cost that you or others paid in order to be there in that moment when the camera lens clicked shut.

But perhaps age has taught me that the earth is still new, molten at the core and still forming, that black leaves in the winter forest will crawl with life in the spring, that our story is ongoing and it is indeed a crime to allow the heart's energies to dissipate with the fading of light on the horizon. I can't be sure. I brood upon it and sleep little. I wait like a denied lover for the blue glow of dawn.