Quotes from Greg Iles

Jung didn't try to separate good and evil. He knew that both exist in every human heart. He called the propensity to evil the Shadow. And he believed that trying to deny or repress the Shadow is dangerous. Because it can't be done. He believed you have to recognize your Shadow, come to grips with it, accept it, and integrate it.

You never wear red to no funeral; red says the dead person was a fool.

Mississippi blood is different. It's got some river in it. Delta soil, turpentine, asbestos, cotton poison. But there's strength in it, too. Strength that's been beat but not broke.

Mothers are fonder than fathers of their children, because they're more certain they are their own.

There's no meaning to be found in tragedy. Only in our response to it.

Let me tell you a secret, Caitlin. We're still in the cave. It's just bigger, and we wear nicer clothes. We make alliances and try to be civil, we save the weak instead of leaving them out in the cold to die. . .

The mills of the gods grind slowly....but they grind to dust.

Greed, apathy, hubris—even loyalty—all demand payment in the end. Storms will always come, and men will always do evil in the shadow of some other word.

But as my mother always said: You never know what's cooking in someone else's pot.

Did the fact that Martin Luther King diddled all those women change what he did for his people? Or Franklin Roosevelt? General Eisenhower? Not one whit. Men are men, and gods are for storybooks. And if you've read your Edith Hamilton or Jane Harrison—or the Old Testament, for that matter—you'll know that gods acted like men most of the time, or worse.

Men of integrity and courage are rare these days.

A glacier consumes whole forests by inches.

There is always something.

Because I expected so little, Gaines's painting is startlingly powerul. A lank-haired blond woman with a hard face sits at akitchen table in the harsh light of a bare bulb. She's surrounded by dirty cereal bowls and fast-food bags, and her shirt is open to the waist, revealing small sagging breasts. Her hollow eyes look out from the canvas with the sullen resignation of an animal that has helped build its own cage.

There's no universal tally of good and evil, balancing right and wrong. The Christians with their God-has-a-plan fantasy, the Hindus with their karmic balance . . . it's all wishful thinking. Primitive religious impulse. Linus's damned security blanket.

Marrying someone you don't love is a sin. Because it sends both of you to hell. It destroys the other person first, but in the end it gets you, too. The magnitude of what you've done, the damage you've caused by forcing you both to live a lie.

The irrevocable events of our lives happen in seconds, sometimes fractions of seconds.

The hour of justice does not strike on the dials of this world.

Nothing frightens me more than the faith in my daughter's eyes. How many men deserve that kind of trust? One by one, the mentors I've most admired eventually revealed chinks in their armor, cracks in their façades, and tired feet of clay—or worse.

Rumor runs through the community like a plague, and truth is the first casualty.

For nothing is lost, nothing is ever lost. There is always the clue, the canceled check, the smear of lipstick, the footprint in the canna bed, the condom on the park path, the twitch in the old wound, the baby shoes dipped in bronze, the taint in the blood stream. And all times are one time, and all those dead in the past never lived before our definition gives them life, and out of the shadow their eyes implore us. —Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men

to yearn for ignorance is to embrace the wishful thinking of a child. For once the stone hits the surface of the pond, the ripples never really stop.

At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst. —Aristotle

To all those adults who return home to repay the debt of childhood, and find they never really left. Listen while you still can.