Quotes from James Lee Burke

I guess that seems like an absurd premise until we consider the possibility that the dead are always with us, beckoning from the shade, reminding us that we're actors in the same drama they have already lived and that they can help us with our lives if we will only let them.

big as a horse turd floating in a milk shake. Wyatt Dixson

Thinking at night isn't good for anybody.

We're going to call him Mr. Adorable. No, we're going to call him Snuggs

You don't have anything, you don't know anything, you're just a noise like a fart in somebody's pants," Segura said.

if you haven't noticed, the United States government is the biggest weapons manufacturer in the world.

Sometimes when that kind of evil comes into our lives, we can't explain it, so we blame it on God or ourselves. In both cases we're wrong. Maybe it's time you let yourself out of prison.

I had to feel sorry for Bubba's wife. In AA we called it denial. We take the asp to our breast and smile at the alarm we see in the eyes of others.

People are what they do, not what they say, not what they think, not what they pretend to be.

There are not many places left in the United States where people can get off the computer, stop filing tax returns, and in effect become invisible. The rain forests in the Cascades and parts of West Montana come to mind, and perhaps the 'Glades still offer hope to those who wish to resign from modern times. The other place is the Atchafalaya Basin.

A category 5 hurricane carries an explosive force several times greater than that of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.

Cruelty and sentimentality are almost always companion characteristics in an individual but never cruelty and love.

When you love somebody, you give up making decisions just for yourself.

He had been humiliated and treated like the white trash he was. Under the bedsheet that hides the identity of every Ku Klux Klansman is a cretinous, vicious, and childlike human being whose last holdout is his whites-only restroom.

But the rain gods went away. They ain't coming back, either." "How do you know that?" "They got no reason to. We don't believe in them no more.

Gamblers and lovers pay big dues and enjoy limited consolations. But sometimes they are enough.

She wore a black blouse with a white lace collar and had an animated sternness about her that suggested a conjugal situation similar to waking up each morning on a medieval rack.

There are those who are made different in the womb.

documented in a security file was of no concern to him. The fact that a man like Joe Tex could have access to it

Mexico was not a country, Krill thought. It was a revolution that had never stopped.

I returned to New Orleans and my problems with pari-mutuel windows and a dark-haired, milk-skinned wife from Martinique who went home with men from the Garden District while I was passed out in a houseboat on Lake Pontchartrain, the downdraft of U.S. Army helicopters flattening a plain of elephant grass in my dreams.

I had learned long ago that resolution by itself is not enough; we are what we do, not what we think and feel.

I wanted to believe he was mad. Unfortunately, I no longer knew what madness was.

Then she walked away, like Helen of Troy turning her back on Attica. A gust of warm wind blew newspapers along the boulevard into the sky. The light was orange and bleeding out of the clouds in the west, the horizon darkening, the waves crashing on the beach just the other side of Seawall Boulevard, the palm trees rattling dryly in the wind. I could smell the salt and the seaweed and the tiny shellfish that had dried on the beach, like the smell of birth. I