Quotes from James Lee Burke

I don't try to correct yesterday's mistakes in the present. I mark them off. I truly mark them off. A person hurts me only once.

We all got human weaknesses, noble mon. All I got to do is see her on TV and my Johnson starts barking.

there are moments when we understand that the earth and the sky and the presences that may lie behind them are always with us.

What might be considered irrational, abnormal, aberrant, ludicrous, illogical, bizarre, schizoid, or schizophrenic to earth people (which is what AAs call nonalcoholics) is usually considered fairly normal by AA members.

The false dawn, with its illusions and mist-wrapped softness, can be as inadequate and fleeting as Morpheus' gifts. CHAPTER 2 The days became warmer the first week in April, and on some mornings I went out on the salt at dawn and seined

It's fair to say that mortality takes many manifestations, but so does the indomitable nature of the human spirit, and it does so in ways that are sometimes hardly noticeable.

If you get your ticket ripped in half, you do it in hot blood, and you do not go gently into that good night.

The false dawn, with its illusions and mist-wrapped softness, can be as inadequate and fleeting as Morpheus' gifts.

We don't care what people say, rock and roll is here to stay.

Nothing wrong with being crazy. It gives you a more interesting view.

A therapist once told me that we're born alone and we die alone. It's not true. We all have an extended family, people whom we recognize as our own as soon as we see them. The people closest to me have always been marked by a peculiar difference in their makeup.

dreams are not a mystery. They simply represent our hopes and fears

Individuals don't change history. History finds the individual. John Steinbeck said that.

degree of civility I normally possess," he said. "What'd she say?

about voices that can cry out for help in our sleep.

But please don't be taken aback. Age is not kind, and it leaves a mean stamp on an elderly man's perceptions.

But the succubus I had tried to exorcise by marrying a woman of peace still held title to my soul. I saw the room distort and the faces of the people around me turn into Grecian masks, and I heard a sound in my ears like the steel tracks of armored vehicles wending their way across an unforgiving land. I heard people screaming and I did not know if their voices were from my sleep or if my own deeds had transformed me into an object of horror and pity in the eyes of my fellow man.

I always had the sense that Desmond was trying to shrink inside his clothes, as though both fear and a great sadness lived inside him.

Straight shooters always win

The great joke is that any wisdom most of us acquire can seldom be passed on to others. I suspect this reality is at the heart of most old people's anger.

go with the wind, all of us twirling among young people who wore flowers in their hair, a church bell clanging without stop in a Spanish mission. Roll on forever, Woody.

while you're laying off the hooch and working the program, your disease is doing push-ups and waiting for the day you slip. You can ease back into the dirty boogie or hit the floor running, but I promise you, the electric tiger, or your version of it, will come back with a roar.

symbolize the ruinous consequence of America's decision to abandon the republic that the entire world admired and loved.

Many years back I gave up all claim to a rational view of the world and even avoided people who believed that the laws of physics and causality have any application 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.