Quotes from Greg Iles

I'm a big believer in first lines. If a writer doesn't grab you with their first sentence, even in a literary novel, they might need to think about another line of work.

In any battle, out of every hundred men, ten shouldn't be there. Eighty are just targets. Nine are good soldiers, and we're lucky to have them. But one, that one is a warrior, and will bring the others home.

Most had lived the first decade of their lives with big grins; too many had lived the remainder with a confused scowl and a diminishing sense of control over their futures.

But inevitably, after all the hardware questions had been answered, Breen would circle down to the question he'd really wanted to ask: What's it like to blow some unsuspecting raghead's shit away from a thousand yards? Carl always answered the same way: I tried not to think about that side of it, sir. It was a job, and I focused on the mechanics of it. Guys like Ray Breen never grasped the true nature of sniping. It was as much about concealment as it was about shooting.

Catfish actually liked white folks, especially the working people. He thought they'd been manipulated by the moneed class to resent blacks, but he reprected their honesty. Said he always knew where he stood with white Southerners, that they always lived up to their word. Uncle Catfish never trusted Yankees.

All human beings, Carl had learned, were fascinated with death. Only those who knew death intimately, as he did, understood its essential mystery.

masked man beats her with the bottle, which doesn't break, thank God. But then he rips off her panties and rapes her with it. Both holes. Serious trauma, but mostly in the back.

American history is punctuated by watershed moments, fulcrum points that separate one sense of ourselves (as a nation) from another.

William Faulkner ever said wasn't written in one of his novels, but spoken during an interview in Paris: The past is never dead; it's not even past.

Faulkner did the same thing in Absalom, Absalaom, demonstrating that no two people ever experience the same event, and that history is doomed ot only be a version of events.

fervent, will not cure the afflicted. Nor

How hard do we work to blind ourselves to things that we don't want to see?

I'm sorry you had to go through this in the dark, she says. But you always were the strong one. My mother's son. right?

My father was different. He couldn't live blindly amid the ruins of a gilded empire where the lost children of Africa worked with fake smiles among their former masters.

the moral convictions of animal rights activists lasted about as long as it took them to get a fatal disease that could be cured by receiving a valve from a pig's heart. Suddenly that pig didn't seem so goddamned sacred after all.

Right meant more than might; that being faithful and good meant more than being rich; that honor superseded all.

For Sweden, the price of aiding the Allies could be fifty thousand uninvited guests

I don't recognize the world anymore, Marshall. Maybe when you stop feeling at home in the world, it's time to leave it.

But now I understand something I did not before;: that the happiness of my childhood was bought with the pain of a black boy who had hurt no one.

You ever read American Tabloid, by James Ellroy?" "No." "Give it a look. Things weren't quite that crazy, but they were damn close.

have crystal meth over in Natchez?" "Of course we do. I'm not interested in the meth. I'm interested in the men who make and sell it." Walker's eyes narrow, then go wide with comprehension. "And what exactly do you want me to do?

IF A MAN is forced to choose between the truth and his father, only a fool chooses the truth.

A man needs someone to engage his deepest emotions, to relieve his drives, to soften his obsessions, to accept the gifts he feels compelled to give, and maybe most important, to simply be with him during the thousands of small moments that in aggregate compose a life.

Walt Garrity stands beside them like a tired cowboy who mistakenly wandered into the painting and can't find his way out.