Quotes from James Lee Burke

Through the screen, he could smell the evening as though it were a living presence, the purple and yellow flowers in his yard and the dark green wetness of the fescue part of a song that was never supposed to die. Except he could feel things ending, coming apart at the center, and he didn't know why.

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

You pull on dat 'gator's tail, he gonna clean your kneecaps, him.

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

As with all megalomaniacs, he had no handles. He was the type of man the Spanish call sin dios, sin verguenza, without God or shame.

There is no higher form of artistic expression then film

If you're wired a certain way, you'll always be in morion, clicking to your own rhythm, all of it in four-four time, avoiding convention and predictability and control as you would a sickness, the whole world waiting for you like an enormous dance pavilion lit by colored lights and surrounded with palm trees. I'm not talking about the dirty boogie. The music of the spheres is right outside your bedroom window.

No matter how you cut it, I was back to the short form of the Serenity Prayer, known in AA and other recovery groups as Fuck It.

there were times when you are very alone in the world and your own thoughts flay your skin an inch at a time.

You just got sprung. Nig Rosewater out there? Clete asked. Nig Rosewater hasn't been up at this hour since World War II.

At a certain age, you realize the greatest loss you can experience is a theft you perpetrate upon yourself—the waste of days given us. Is there any more piercing remorse than the realization that a person has thrown away the potential that resides in every sunrise?

Varina was breathing hard through her nose, her face pinched, not unlike a child's. "You don't know how mad you can make people," she said. "I had tender feelings for you once, whether you knew it or not. But you're a shit, Dave Robicheaux.

But perhaps age has taught me that the earth is still new, molten at the core and still forming, that black leaves in the winter forest will crawl with life in the spring, that our story is ongoing and it is indeed a crime to allow the heart's energies to dissipate with the fading of light on the horizon.

Did you know that the hum of a car engine through the metal and seats is approximately in B-flat, the same as the hum of blood in the arteries of a pregnant woman? That's why children sleep so easily in the backseat of an automobile.

I told myself I did not have to live as I once did. I did not have to re-create the violent moments that used to come aborning like a sulfurous match flaring off a thumbnail.

Who can make sense of the roles we play? If I could draw any conclusion about the long, depressing slog of human progress, it's the possibility that unseen elements lie just on the other side of the physical universe and that somehow we're actors on the stage of the Globe, right across the Thames from a place called Pissing Alley, whether William Shakespeare or Christopher Marlowe are aware of our presence or not.

ALL MEN HAVE a religion or totems of some kind. Even the atheist is committed to an enormous act of faith in his belief that the universe created itself and the subsequent creation of intelligent life was simply a biological accident.

Not everybody gets to see a blinding light on the way to Damascus.

soldiers who return from foreign battlefields with a syndrome that survivors of the Great War called the thousand-yard stare.

Then I saw the consuming nature of her fear, her willingness to believe that exploitative charlatans could change her fate or really cared what happened to her, the dread and angst that congealed like a cold vapor around her heart when she awoke each morning, one day closer to the injection table at Angola.

The Homeric Epic does not have to be discovered inside a book; it begins just west of Fort Worth and extends all the way to Santa Monica.

Deviants and monsters ran the camps where families were sent up the chimney or turned into bars of soap, but they would have been powerless without the clerks who sat anonymously behind typewriters and gave them bureaucratic legitimacy.

I wasn't a criminal, but I was genuinely insane. My greatest enemy is sleep. I see the men and boys I killed many years ago in a foreign land, and I'm filled with sorrow. Have you had those experiences, sir? Please tell me that is indeed the case and that you wish to get them out of your life. Can you do that for me, sir?

Profanity is the tool early man used to ward off situations he couldn't change—in other words, a confession of inadequacy.