Quotes from Greg Iles

Wharlest Jackson used to ask: 'How can we change the white man's heart? How can we make him see that we're all the same inside?

elbowed Danny. "You think Shields is the father of that baby?

Will on the phone, the sooner you stop bleeding." Hickey dialed a number and

When drug dealers get killed—black or white—the public perception is that the victims simply got what was coming to them. When a young girl is raped and murdered—black or white—our knowledge of the primitive laws of attraction and male sexual dominance informs our response. But when middle-aged white people minding their own business are murdered in their home in the safest part of town, the fundamental order of Southern life is thrown out of balance.

There's nothing harder than fighting alone, with no one to keep you company in your foxhole.

When we reach the intersection with Homochitto Street, I turn right, into town, and soon we're passing Dunleith, the antebellum mansion that I always say makes Tara from Gone with the Wind look like a woodshed.

some harsher truths: that the world they will find beyond the borders of Mississippi looks very different from the one that nurtured them to this point; that the whites among them might soon find themselves the targets of prejudice for a change;

Frost's "The Death of the Hired Man" ran through his overheated brain: Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

Willie Stark's eternal rule: There is always something.

While Sands's eyes flicker with private mirth, the evil that Tim hinted at fills my soul like a squid's ink.

Deer were damn good swimmers, though not many people knew it.

Some stories must wait to be told. Any writer worth his salt knows this. Sometimes you wait for events to percolate in your subconscious until a deeper truth emerges; other times you're simply waiting for the principals to die. Sometimes it's both. This story is like that.

At least fifty people are sitting or standing within sight of me. The oldest ones sit on their stoops beneath dented metal awnings. The middle-aged stand in little knots, the men sharing bottles wrapped in paper sacks, the women holding babies. I don't see any teenagers—it's as though they've been drafted for some special war—but several toddlers walk unsupervised through the parking lot. Three of them are naked.

He hired people who were either barely qualified or lacked credentials, so they didn't have the courage to challenge him. He kept a few competent people to whom he channeled the bulk of the work he didn't understand. And his superiors had less technical knowledge than he did.

She's floating outside in the maternal holding pattern all women learn after they have children, one that serves them well after grandchildren come along.

Storms will always come, and men will always do evil in the shadow of some other word. It's how we respond that defines us.

Now it turns out he was having sex with his babysitter, and they're so pissed off they're about to pop. But their anger's not really about Kate, you know? It's about them. They feel betrayed. They put him up on a pedestal, and then he committed the crime of being human. So fuck him, right? Never mind that Kate was two weeks shy of eighteen, and on the make for exactly the kind of affair she had with Drew.

Albert didn't know how that skinny school teacher could take what Willie gave her. But that was another thing he'd learned over the years; the size of the woman on the outside didn't mean nothing. It was how much hunger she had on the inside that made her what she was between the sheets.

Every son eventually learns his daddy has feet of clay. You just happen to have a father of singular rectitude, so it took until you were forty-five. That doesn't make it any less painful.

If physicists want to develop a time machine, they should explore fear. Fear dilates and compresses time without limit. For desperate people awaiting rescue, every instant stretches into unendurable agony; for those awaiting death by cancer, the earth spins relentlessly, shortening the days until they pass like fanned pages in a book. Trapped in our bodies, perception is all, and the engine of perception is hunger for life.

Nothing increases the odds of victory more than letting the enemy think he''s already taken your secret weapon."

A slice off a cut loaf's never missed, right?

behind them.

In 1850, Natchez boasted more millionaires than every city in America except New York and Philadelphia