Quotes from Greg Iles

And the country has drifted so far off course, nobody even cares about the truth anymore.

And I learned a long time ago, if you're going to wait for this world to be fair, you're going to be waiting in the grave.

Things always come back into balance, though, right? Eventually." Dad goes very still, eerily so considering his disease. "Eventually. Balance came back in 1918 after twenty million deaths. It came back in 1945 after seventy million. It's getting the pendulum back to the midpoint that's the killer. And right now it's being pushed hard right, all around the world. The last gasp of Ozymandias—once more, with feeling.

PET scan and gene therapy. "I need you

The colonel had a single vice—whiskey—and he looked forward to the anesthetic burn of the Kentucky bourbon with sublime anticipation.

We're all terrified by rattlesnakes, but the spider we brush off our sleeve with hardly a thought is far more likely to hurt us.

He had never seen such eyes before, not even in the faces of soldiers unmanned in the midst of great carnage. Eyes like black mirrors, at once shallow and bottomless. He had the feeling that if he pressed his finger to one of those eyes, it would shatter and fall inward through a black cavern of grief and loss that could never be filled.

The images I'd most like to wipe away cling to life with the tenacity of weeds, while those I want to treasure fade like the blush on a rose.

McCrae was the kind of southerner who had only left the parish of his birth to serve his country in wartime or to carry bulls across the state for mating purposes.

We should be covered into the earth by people who loved us.

into another identity. And I

Comparing that shyster to a snake would be a slander to the serpent.

Those who love heroes must walk a stony road.

The sheriff faced forward, the downward angle of his big head radiating disappointment.

Because death is the end, and if a man doesn't speak before it silences him, then the things he holds closest die with him.

darkness turned to noon. Even with the nose cone of the Learjet pointed away from the blast, the flash blinded everyone inside. Diaz lost control of the aircraft. It pitched over into a screaming, spinning dive, hurtling earthward at over five hundred miles per hour. In the cabin, people slammed into each other in the terror of flashblindness. General Steyn screamed in pain. Hauer half-fell past Burton into the cockpit. "Straighten up!" he screamed.

As we move, a roar like the voice of some satanic creature bellows from the staircase. The fire's voice. I've heard it in lots of places, and the sound turns my insides to jelly. There's a reason human beings will jump ten floors onto concrete to escape being burned alive. That roar is part of it.

We rarely act from logic when facing the critical choices of our lives.

Kaiser and Lenz are staring at each other like hunters who have walked into a thicket after a lion and found a unicorn.

I've sometimes wondered whether human beings are like the universe itself, where 95 percent of what surrounds us is dark matter, and cannot be seen. The only way black holes can be detected is by the behavior of what's around them—light and matter being distorted by immense forces within the collapsing star. Have I seen and yet not seen certain events that hint at deep

But what refuses to leave my mind is the image of Drew and Kate making love before the camera. Mia viewed that photograph with me and felt no embarrassment at all. On the contrary, she wants to experience the same intensity she saw there with me. More than that, she's telling me beforehand that I'll have no obligation to her. Evolutionary nirvana, Caitlin called it. God, was she right.

Posts oriented into a Woodhenge, a huge circle for astronomical observations." "Like Stonehenge?" "Exactly like that. Or Cahokia, a similar site up in Illinois.

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming'?

Of course you have. I'm a man, and I respond to all that you are. But I also feel things that a father feels for a daughter. Mainly, I feel very protective of you. And my first duty is to protect you from me.