Quotes from James Lee Burke

drunk feels for his glass. It is stronger and worse than any sexual desire, any fear of hell, any allegiance to family, country, or church.

You don't realize the gift you have.

All our dreams and hopes become as naught, and evil men are allowed to hang their lanterns on our tombstones. What greater folly is there?

THE TAILINGS OF the monsoon season moved across the sun that evening, darkening and wetting the land and lighting the sky with electricity that quivered and disappeared between the buttes and the clouds.

Why don't you try to make me feel bad?

It's funny what can happen when you lay bare the heart and join the Earth's old dance through the heavens.

We are the sum total of what we have done and where we have been, and I sincerely believe that in many ways the world in which I grew up was better than the one in which we live today.

It's always today, Jim, and it's just going to get better and better," I said.

I wasn't interested in trying to explain how the measure of one's life finally reduces itself to the possession of the moment, then the moment after that, moving through each of them in sequence from day to day, letting go of yesterday and asking nothing from the future except to be there for it.

Ernest Hemingway said chasing the past is a bum way to live your life," the sheriff said. "He also said he never took his own advice.

it can reach a murderous intensity within minutes over a betrayed trust, a lie, a wrong against a family member.

As a police officer it has been my experience that pedophiles are able to operate and stay functional over long periods of time and victimize scores, even hundreds, of children, because no one wants to believe his or her own intuitions about the symptoms in the perpetrator.

what do you say to people who are doing their best when their best is not enough?

I wished life consisted of just taking care of animals, the earth, and one's family and friends. In fact, that's what it should be. But it's not, and the explanation for that fact is not one I have ever been able to provide.

At that moment I realized the error of my thinking about Bootsie. The problem wasn't in her disease, it was in mine. I wanted a lock on the future; I wanted our marriage to be above the governance of mortality and chance; and, most important, in my nightly sleeplessness over her health, and the black fatigue that I would drag behind me into the day like a rattling junkyard, I hadn't bothered to be grateful for the things I had.

That's good. Because if you love somebody, or if you love the church, like I do, then you don't ever have to be afraid. People are only superstitious when they're afraid. That's an important lesson for little people to learn.

Sometimes if you listen, you can hear the earth stop, like it's waiting for you to catch up with it. Like it's your friend and it wants you to be at peace with it.

Psychoneurotic anxiety and agitated depression coupled with an ideational personality produce a combination that is like being boiled alive.

her mouth and the earnestness in her expression were of a kind that made both the celibate and the happily married question the wisdom of their vows.

Varina could weave a spiderweb and sprinkle it with gold dust and lure you inside and wrap it around both your eyes and your heart, all the while making you enjoy your own entrapment.

It is the kind of sobbing you only hear from a woman, because it comes from pain that men do not have to bear; it's the pain of labor; it's the pain of rejection and betrayal; it is a form of rage so great there is no receptacle big enough in which to confine it. And worst of all, it cannot be described or understood by those who have not experienced it themselves.

New Orleans would always be New Orleans, he told himself, no matter if it had gone under the waves, no matter if cynical and self-serving politicians had left the people of the lower Ninth Ward to drown. New Orleans was a song and a state of mind and a party that never ended, and those who did not understand that simple fact should have to get passports to enter the city.

Alcoholism is not a disease here but a venerated family heirloom.

Wicked men do not go away of their own accord.