Quotes from James Lee Burke

he saw no fence between this world and the one that lay behind it.

The sky was black, creaking with electricity, like someone crumpling cellophane.

When a man molests a woman or girl, he steals her identity. You don't know who you are anymore. You don't have an address or a home. You're nothing. It's like a stain you can't wash out of your soul

Nova Scotia in 1755 fell into decline and became associated with ignorance and failure and poverty. The fisher-people of southern Louisiana became ashamed of who they were.

The juke and barbecue joints were loud, the doors wide open, the elevated sidewalks inset with tethering rings and littered with paper cups and beer cans, rust-stained where the rain spouts bled across the concrete. ~ James Lee Burke

When death stole the love of your life, no amount of revenge ever healed the hole in your heart. You lived with anger and physical yearnings that were insatiable, and you went about dismantling yourself on a daily basis, tendon and joint, for the rest of your days, all the time wearing the mask of a court jester.

But the past is the past, and you don't get it back.

When I closed my eyes, a lantern lit up the inside of my head, as if I had punched a hypodermic loaded with morphine into my arm.

There may be room in government service for the altruist and the iconoclast, but I have yet to see one who was not treated as an oddity at best and at worst an object of suspicion and fear.

past Louis Armstrong Park, a place no white person in his right mind enters either day or night

Be your own man, even if you don't add up to much.

Listening to a story told by Clete Purcel was like building the pyramids with your bare hands. I twirled my finger, trying to make him finish.

I could have written the entire incident off, but any time three people report a scream, they're calling not about a sound but about a memory that lives in the collective unconscious, one that goes back to the cave. When we are alarmed to the degree that we have to tell others about it, we're dipping into a primal knowledge about the darker potential of the gene pool. Or at least this has always been my belief.

said. "Whatdid you say?" she said. He shifted his rifle to his left hand and spun her in the opposite direction, then pushed her hard between the shoulder blades, snapping her head back. When she

money and money and money, the one item that human beings will go to any lengths to acquire.

I also smell it on you.

I also figuredd out that what we call our destiny is usually determined by two or three casual decision which on the surface seem about as important as spitting your gum through a sewer grate.

Praise for JAMES LEE BURKE "James Lee Burke is the reigning champ of nostalgia noir." —The New York Times Book Review "A gorgeous prose stylist." —Stephen King "James Lee Burke is the heavyweight champ, a great American novelist whose work, taken individually or as a whole, is unsurpassed." —Michael Connelly "Burke's evocative prose remains a thing of reliably fierce wonder.

Advice might be cheap, but there is nothing facile about the faith of those to whom we give it.

Molly Boyle and I made love in the bedroom, in the slow and unhurried fashion of people who are secure in the knowledge the two of them, together, have legitimate claim on the next day, and that mortality and the demands of the world are no longer of great importance. What better moment could human beings create for themselves? Let the world, at least for tonight, find its own answers for a change, I told myself.

PEOPLE ARE WHAT they do, not what they think, not what they say.

And like most middle-aged people who hear the clock ticking in their lives, I had come to resent a waste or theft of my time that was far greater than any theft of my goods or money.

As flawed as Southern culture is, mendacity has always been treated in the South as a despicable characteristic. Notice how often Southerners casually address others as "you son of a bitch" with no insult intended. When the same person calls someone a "lying son of a bitch," you know he's serious.

When they glanced up at us in unison, they reminded me of late-night drinkers in a bar who stare at the front door each time it opens, as though the person coming through it possesses an answer to the hopelessness that governs their lives.