Quotes from Greg Iles

he committed such a heinous act, would have owned up to it and taken his punishment like a man, as the archaic phrase goes. That may be a quaint and sexist notion these days, but some of what is best about the South is archaic. The tragedy is that it should be so.

The past is always with us, darling," Tom went on. "Sometimes we carry it lightly, but other times it's like dragging a wounded brother behind you.

carefully negotiated his way

About twenty minutes ago, during a commercial break, Melba had thought she'd heard a helicopter in the distance. Tom had been unable to hear it, but that was no surprise, given his progressive hearing loss, and she'd heard nothing since. He told her it was probably nothing to worry about. Statistically, Mississippi had some of the worst drivers in the nation, so LifeFlight helicopters were common at all hours, even over rural counties.

Sheriff Dennis lifts an Ole Miss coffee mug off the desk and spits tobacco juice into it. "I like spitting on the Rebels," he says distractedly.

Nothing was what you thought it was, because no one was who they pretended to be.

As Peggy snored beside him, Tom pondered the Greek and Hebrew legends of the scapegoat. Pharmakos to the Greeks, Azazel to the Hebrews. A shameful human practice, he'd always thought, one born from guilt and superstition. But most human behavior had grown out of necessity, and he now understood the empirical value of the rituals for which he had felt only contempt before.

When people got into the habit of lying, they came to depend on it as a means of sliding easily through life.

between us. That night I prayed like a man trying to polish coal

Justice is God's business. Nothing ever balances out equal in this world. Only in Heaven.

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

her? I wonder. "Tom?" I say, taking advantage of

I know things are changing, but they don't change everywhere at the same speed. Down here time moves on the different clock. Down here it's still forty years ago, in some ways.

fathers and brothers who would readily kill to avenge those they should have loved far better when the person was alive.

superior numbers took their toll. Realizing that he and

You ain't a southern gentleman till you dipped your pen in ink

The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always.

path of least resistance, or the walk over hot coals.

There it was, the choice I'd confronted so often in life: the path of least resistance, or the walk over hot coals.

God is merely a part of the human brain, an evolutionary coping mechanism that developed to make bearable our awareness of our own deaths. When

Hindsight is always 20/20, foresight rarely better than a blur

change my conviction.

I don't say it was hard, because everybody got it hard, some way.

who gave of their time: Joe Files, MD, Rod Givens, MD