Quotes from James Lee Burke

As a revolutionary people, we Americans won a probable victory over the best and biggest army in the world because we learned to fight from the Indians. You can do a lot of damage with a Kentucky rifle from behind a tree. You don't put on a peaked hat and a red coat and white leggings and crossed white bandoleers with a big silver buckle in the center of the X and march uphill into a line of Howitzers loaded with chain and chopped horseshoes.

Sometimes your luck runs out and you have to accept that the life you planned was a dream written on water.

The Gulf Stream waters of Woody Guthrie's famous song were strung with columns of oil that were several miles long.

This is Louisiana, Dave. Guatemala North. Quit pretending it's the United States. Life will make a lot more sense," he said.

If you have attended the dying, you know what their last moments are like. They anticipate the separation of themselves from the world of the living before you do, and they accept it with dignity and without complaint

Somehow sleep allows us to see clearly those very things that are obscured by the light of day.

There's enough evil in the human heart to incinerate the earth.

I made her talk about her family, her home, her music, and her work, everything that defined who she was before Bobby Joe had touched her with his probing hands.

Saint Augustine once admonished that we should never use the truth to injure. I believe there are dark and uncertain moments in our lives when it's not wrong for each of us to feel that he wrote those words especially for us.

We all have an extended family, people whom we recognize as our own as soon as we see them.

god bless the world

The human spirit is frail. People believe whatever they need to believe. I feel sorry for all of them.

There are certain kinds of currency you acquire in life. Most of it is ephemeral. But friendship and faith in the unseen world and the commitment to be true unto thine own self are the human glue that you never give up, not for any reason.

Cancer and lightning go where they want. So does political corruption.

If anyone tells you he's from New Orleans and doesn't drink, he's probably not from New Orleans. Louisiana is not a state; it's an outdoor mental asylum in which millions of people stay bombed most of their lives. That's not an exaggeration. Cirrhosis is a family heirloom.

Tomorrow has no more existence than yesterday, but you can always control now. We live in a series of nows. Think about now.

the only argument you ever win is the one you don't have.

It was the poem that explained the nature of courage and turned the mystery of death into a heroic couplet. Ultimately, it was the poem that banished fear from the heart and transformed us from actors into participants.

Death was a rodent that ate its way inch by inch through your entrails, chewed at your liver and stomach, severed tendon from organ, until finally, when you were along in the dark, it sat gorged and sleek next to your head, its eyes resting, its wet muzzle like a kiss, a promise whispered in your ear.

What happens outside of us doesn't count. That's something we don't have control over. It's what we do with it, the way that we react to it, that's important.

The air smelled like Bayou Teche when it's spring and the fish are spawning among the water hyacinths and the frogs are throbbing in the cattails and the flooded cypress.

Prosecutors often wince when they have to take a child abuser to trial, because usually the only witnesses they can use are children who are terrified at the prospect of testifying against their parents.

Jimmie would forever be the Renaissance humanist, bearing his faith and optimism like a white light inside a chalice.

Every drunkard has many moments of shame that live like carpet tacks in his memory