Quotes from James Lee Burke

When people make a contract with the devil and give him an air-conditioned office to work in, he doesn't go back home easily.

No matter what the other side does to you, you grin and walk through the cannon smoke. It drives them crazy.

People were not what they said. They were not what they thought. They were not what they promised. People were what they did. When the final tally was done, nothing else mattered.

My experience has been that grief and loss do not necessarily become more acceptable with time, and commitment to them is of no value to either the living or the dead.

As I was to learn, patience and latitude and even humility are, paradoxically, the handmaidens of wealth, because virtue is costly only for those who own nothing else.

There's no substitute for loyalty.

Coincidence is your Higher Power acting with anonymity.

There's another way to put it. Sometimes your luck runs out and you have to accept that the life you planned was a dream written on water.

But everyone has a private cathedral that he earns, a special place to which he returns when the world is too much late and soon, and loss and despair come with the rising of the sun.

The boos always come from the cheap seats. We gain no wisdom by imposing our way on others

I had found the edge. The place where you unstrap all your fastenings to the earth, to what you are what you have been, where you flame out on the edge of the spheres, and the sun and moon become eclipsed and the world below is as dead and remote and without interest as if it were glazed with ice.

I bet that guy could steal the stink off of shit

The reason people don't buy conspiracy theories is they think 'conspiracy' means everybody's on the same program. That's not how it works. Everybody's got a different program. They just all want the same guy dead. Socrates was a gadfly, but I bet he took time out to screw somebody's wife.

My experience with age it instills a degree of patience in some, leaves the virtuous spiritually unchanged, feeds the character defects in others, and brings little wisdom to any of us.

The photographs of the inmates at Bergen-Belsen or Andersonville Prison or the bodies in the ditch at My Lai disturb us in a singular fashion because those instances of egregious human cruelty were committed for the most part by baptized Christians.

THE ALLURE OF Montana is like a commitment to a narcotic; you can never use it up or get enough of it. Its wilderness areas probably resemble the earth on the first day of creation.

Then Belmont discovered the carnival world of Louisiana politics, in the way a mental patient might wander into a theme park for the insane and realize that life held more promise than he had ever dreamed. Burke, James Lee. Purple Cane Road (Dave Robicheaux Book 11)

Baptized Christians ran the ovens in the camps.

Hope was the light that allowed man to prevail in the worst of circumstances. But it also could become the narcotic of the self-deluded and the naive.

One day you'll have a quiet heart.

If we break promises to God, shouldn't we be allowed an occasional violation of our word to our friends and superiors?

But the participants [in war] never forgot the details of their experience, and like the Wandering Jew, they were condemned to remain their own history books, each containing a story they could not pass on to others and from which no one would learn anything of value.

Most criminals are stupid. They creep $500,000 homes in the Garden District, load up two dozen bottles of gin, whiskey, vermouth, and Collins mix in a $2,000 Irish linen tablecloth and later drink the booze and throw the tablecloth away.

I had seen a dawn like this one only twice in my life: once in Vietnam, when a Bouncing Betty had risen from the earth on a night trail and twisted its tentacles of light around my thighs, and years earlier outside of Franklin, Louisiana, when my father and I discovered the body of a labor organizer who had been crucified with sixteen-penny nails, ankle and wrist, against a barn wall. - Sunset Limited