Quotes from James Lee Burke

Thank you, but the South is a state of mind rather than a place. Much of it is good, but much of it dark, thanks to our replication of original sin in the form of the Middle Passage. John Calvin and Cornelius Jansen spat in the punch bowl as well.

Shakespeare said that all power lies in the world of dreams, and I believe him.

Mark Shondell could lay no such claim. He sought revenge on others for his own failure, and helped inculcate racial hatred and fear in the electorate to divide us against ourselves. I had known his kind all my life.

Half the state is underwater, and the other half is under indictment. Our own congressional representative said that.

But I had learned long ago not to argue with those who need to revise the past.

politicians were liars who served the interests of corporations, that populists were con artists, and that the poor were kept poor and uneducated as long as possible.

But I do believe there are people in our midst who wish to make a graveyard of the world, and their motivation may be no more complex than that of an angry child flinging scat because he was left with regularity in a dirty diaper.

but ask yourself, have you ever known anyone whose marriage was saved by a marriage counselor, whose drinking was cured by a psychiatrist, whose son was kept out of reform school by a social worker? In a badass, beer-glass brawl, would you rather have an academic liberal covering your back or a hobnailed redneck?

Pretty damn boring to be a spectator in your own life.

The lowest of the low-bottom groups in Jefferson and Orleans parishes was the Work the Steps or Die, Motherfucker meeting, a collection of outlaw bikers, prostitutes, street bums, wet-brains, and violent offenders known in Angola as "big stripes." After

Die, Motherfuckers held what is called a group-conscience meeting, and Eddy was told to hit the bricks and never come back unless he wanted his head shoved up a Harley-Davidson exhaust pipe.

At four-twenty every morning I wake and have no idea where or who I am.

I always thought their masterpiece was the night they hauled away a corrupt judge's sports car from his driveway and returned it to the same spot before dawn, compacted into a gleaming block of crushed metal not much larger than a footlocker. Ozone Eddy was to New Orleans what mustard gas was to trench warfare; you tried to stay upwind from him, but it was not an easy task.

A tanker truck appeared far down the wavy surface of the highway, headlights on, its weight and shimmering cylindrical shape and dedicated purpose so great and unrelenting that it seemed to move and jitter against the sun's afterglow without sound or mechanically driven power, sustained by its own momentum, as though the truck had a destiny that had been planned long ago.

Bienvenu, mon raton laveur et votre tee amis, aussi.

You put me in mind of a man who spent his last cent on Ex-Lax and forgot the pay toilet cost a dime.

Many years ago I learned that we discover the best and worst in people when they're under duress. I think that principle has certainly borne out with my pitiful friend. I wish I had not been witness to it. I take his car keys and drive him to my home and keep him there until he's sober. He weeps in shame before he drives himself home.

It was the kind of timeless evening in Louisiana when spring and fall and winter and summer come together in a perfect equinox, so exquisite and lovely that the dying of the light seems a violation of a divine ordinance. It was an evening that was wonderful in every way possible.

Get a lot of gone between you and this situation.

At least those were the perceptions of an aging man whose retrospective vision was probably no more accurate today than it was when he was young.

each morning is a blessing, as votive in nature as a communion wafer raised to the sky.

At age nineteen I did not want to accept the possibility that a man's murder could be treated with the social significance of a hangnail that had been snipped off someone's finger.

We drove to the St. Martin Parish Sheriff's Annex, next to the white-columned courthouse past which twenty thousand Union troops had marched in pursuit of Colonel Mouton's malnourished Confederate troops in their unending retreat from Shiloh, all the way to the Red River parishes of central Louisiana.

Wars of enormous importance are fought in places nobody cares about.