Quotes from James Lee Burke

I can't really say." "It amounts to believing others when they tell you you're a good fellow. Give that some thought.

Unfortunately, at a certain age, wanting something you can't be or wanting what you can't have can become a way of life.

Many people do not understand that drug and alcohol addiction are joined at the hip with clinical depression and psychoneurotic anxiety. The combination of the two is devastating. An outsider has no comprehension of the misery that a clinically depressed person carries. The pain is like dealing with an infected gland. One touch and the entire system tries to shut down, because the next stop might be the garden of Gethsemane.

Forget morality tales and all the fury and mire of human complexity, and follow the money. It will lead you through urban legends about sex and revenge and jealousy and the acquisition of power over others, but ultimately, it will lead you to the issue from which all the other motivations derive—money, piles of it, green and lovely and cascading like leaves out of a beneficent sky, money and money and money, the one item that human beings will go to any lengths to acquire.

I have long believed that my generation is a transitional one and will be the last to remember what we refer to as traditional America.

Want to talk later? After

I believed Jimmy had an enormous capacity for either good or evil, and that his spirit was as capricious as a wind vane. F. Scott Fitzgerald once said no one could understand America without understanding the graves of Shiloh. I think the same could have been said of Jimmy Nightingale.

Jolie Blon," the most haunting and unforgettable lament I have ever heard.

What had the sheriff said, something to the effect that most people's public roles were pure bullshit? I wondered if he should not be given an endowed chair at the local university.

the men who break in and steal by night, who spread self-doubt and fear and acrimony, will eventually fall by the wayside and be unremembered ciphers that disappear like scraps of newspaper in our rearview mirror.

Are the very rich very different from you and me? What an absurdity. How about this as a better question: In what way are they similar to us?

I didn't know who Ernest Hemingway was until I moved to Key West and visited his house on Whitehead Street," she said. "Then I started reading his books, and I saw something in one of them I never forgot. He said the test of all morality is whether you feel good or bad about something the morning after.

I still wanted to believe George Orwell's admonition that people are always better than we think they are.

Administrators don't believe in conspiracies. If they did, they'd have to resign their jobs. That

Barbara Shanahan, sometimes known as Battering Ram Shanahan. She was over six feet tall and had freckles and wore her light red hair cut short and wore a blue suit with white hose. She worked hard and was a good prosecutor, and I had always wanted to like her. But she seldom smiled and she went about her job with the abrasiveness of a carpenter building coffins with a nail gun.

He has finally learned that lying to oneself is an offense for which human beings seldom grant themselves absolution. He comes to believe that acceptance of a wintry place in the soul and a refusal to speak about it to others is as much consolation as a man gets, and for some odd reason that thought seems to bring him peace.

Perhaps indeed the weights on the scale get balanced and in the fifth act a semblance of catharsis and order is imposed upon the players and we continue our lives and do our best until the day comes when we have to go either gentle or raging into that good night. I suspect the real issue is how we conduct ourselves when the ironies of fate seem more than the soul can bear.

Then an event happened that caused him to wonder at the great folly that seemed to govern his life, namely, his attempts to plan and control his future. Most of the events that changed his life had taken place without his consent and at the time had seemed of little consequence. Our destiny didn't lie in the stars, he told himself, or even in our mettle. It lay in our ability to recognize a gift when it was placed in your hands.

I could feel myself slipping inside that dark alcoholic envelope of depression and regret that for long periods had been characteristic of my adult life.

I wish I had all the answers," he said. "Like knowing the mind of God. I'd love to get in on that.

Maybe justice is finally catching up with this asshole.

What's an ideologue?" "Someone who brings religious passion to a political abstraction only cretins could think up," he said. "When you meet one, flee his presence at all costs. He'll incinerate half the planet to save the other half and never understand his own motivations.

Somebody tried to pop me with a shotgun." "It doesn't sound like Ronnie Earl." "Why not?" "He's got two interests in life: sex and getting high. The guy's a walking gland. The only reason he got thin was to get laid when he got out. Cain't y'all send us a higher grade of criminals?

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.