Quotes from Greg Iles

I'd come home after eighteen hours of looking at murdered children and she'd be upset that the new drapes for the living room didn't quite match the carpet. I tried more than once to explain it to her, but when I told the unvarnished truth, she didn't want to know. Who would, if they didn't have to? She had to shut all that out, and I got shut out with it.

It was so easy to forget the man was dying. Danny wondered if Shields forgot it himself sometimes. For the first second or two after he woke up in the morn ings, maybe. Danny had a paraplegic friend who'd ex perienced that. He said there was nothing worse than the crushing weight of remembering that he was para lyzed and couldn't get out of bed.

Do you think I haven't been tempted? Warren shouted. Do you think I haven't had nurses offer me any damn thing I wanted, no strings attached? I'm sure you have. Not only nurses. Wives of friends, teachers at the school, friends of yours! The signs are always up: 'Pussy for rent'! Nobody has any honor anymore. Nobody keeps their promises.

Biegler, you remind me of every REMF I ever met in a combat zone. You want a guaranteed result with zero risk, and your ass covered if the shit hits the fan. But that's not how it works in the real world. So please shut the fuck up and let me work here.

Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. —GALATIANS 6:7

circa 1985. Vida's great claim to fame was winning a televised wet T-shirt contest in Destin she'd beaten 150 other competitors-but two children and ten thousand cheeseburgers had deflated her prized assets and hidden her waist in a roll of hard fat.

I want you to inject this into a red-top Vacutainer and spin it down." "Okay. What tests do you want done?" "A CBC and a standard Chem-20. But don't throw any serum away. I may do some more tests

The naïveté of human beings is truly breathtaking

named False Witness the fourth-best legal thriller ever written." "After what?" "Anatomy of a Murder , The Caine Mutiny , and Presumed Innocent.

You said you had enough evidence to convict Jonathan Sands of money laundering on your own." "That's correct." "I'd like to see that evidence." "I'd like a chocolate chip cookie without the chips." "Mr. Cage—

were there when I got home, I could blurt out the truth

Oh. Does Mississippi have some kind of grave-desecration statute? I know they differ from state to state." "Mississippi does, thank God. Anybody who comes across human remains in this state must report them. And a discovery like that stops whatever's going on around it. Even major construction. Doesn't matter whether the land is public or private.

When you write a book, you have total control of the universe and everyone in it.

something new every time." The sound of forest insects comes from the phone. Then the screen lights up with the green sweep of my backyard. Even from the kitchen counter, I can see Jet's naked body sitting astride mine on the patio steamer chair. "That didn't come off Pornhub," Paul says. "That's the real deal.

You ever read American Tabloid, by James Ellroy?

My clearest memory of Ferriday is driving over to sit in the decaying old Arcade theater in 1978, because unlike Natchez's conservative theaters, the Arcade was showing Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter. To this day, I believe the Arcade owners booked the film because they thought it was a movie about deer hunting, not Vietnam. The Concordia Beacon

Complexity offers refuge from choice, and thus from action. In most situations, most of us would prefer to do nothing. Sic transit gloria mundi.

I have resolved a simple thing: I will do those things which make me happy today, and which I can also live with ten years from now.

White America looks at the Vietnamese, the Irish, the Jews, and they say, 'What's the problem with the blacks?' The resentment you hear around this town is based on that, not on old ideas of superiority.

Has anybody even talked to Dr. Shields yet? Willie shrugged. Then his radio crackled again. We've set up the command post in the Shieldses' front yard, under a stand of trees. Tell Carl to get his ass up here, ricky-tick. You heard the man, said Willie. Carl exhaled long and slow, trying to prepare himself for the blast of testosterone he would encounter a few hundred yards up the street.

Grief is the most solitary emotion; it makes islands of us all.

The question isn't who's going to let me; it's who's going to stop me.

Where good people stand against evil, sooner or later fate demands a reckoning.

A man who has known both love and grief and understands that one if the price of the other