Quotes from Greg Iles

She steps inside my proffered hand and draws me to her in a one-armed hug that lasts long enough for me to learn that she's been drinking gin without much tonic and that her breasts are not original architecture.

Even chitlins smell good to a starving man.

blacks who had been dragging the city down for the past twenty years. Rusk and a few trusted friends referred to them as "untouchables.

Sometimes we think we are moving randomly. But random behavior is rare in humans. We are always spiraling around something, whether we see it or not, a secret center of gravity with the invisible power of a black hole.

Old Shelby said something interesting about facts: 'People make a grievous error thinking that a list of facts is the truth. Facts are just the bare bones out of which truth is made.

Hannah Arendt had it right: evil is incomprehensibly banal. The existentialists went her one better: it's also absurd, and terrifyingly so.

I remember something similar from reading Anais Nin in college, that Nin had seduced her father several times; but Nin had been profligate in her sexual adventures, and besides, she was French.

diffident voice. "You're not going to believe this.

a military base, to check out the story.

But now that I've seen the reality up close, I understand white frustration. Black people here are just different. Not all of them, but so many. I don't know why. Maybe it's because this was one of the biggest slaveholding cotton counties along the river. I don't know. I used to think it was ignorance, but I'm starting to see it as willful ignorance, and maybe worse.

Mom covers the wrought-iron patio table with newspaper, and Dad dumps the steaming crawfish

Their belligerence in public places, their rudeness…there's almost a pride in ignorance here. Black employees refuse to wait on white customers in stores. They treat incompetence as though it's some kind of act of civil disobedience. I'm sick of it, Penn.

The Secret History.

And the black politicians…my God. I've watched black aldermen do patently illegal things and then brag about it. They don't care whether something is legal or not." "White politicians abused the system for years, Caitlin. They just did it in a more subtle way." "I know that. But is that an excuse for blacks to repeat the abuses of the old system? The system Martin Luther King and Malcolm X died to dismantle?

Is that a no? she asks . Once burned, twice shy, Sam chimes in. I like Wilde's quote better, Caitlin rejoins. What's that? I ask. The burnt child loves the fire. The Quiet Game. The Quiet Game (Kindle Locations 1477-1479). Kindle Edition.

county rescue boat to recover the corpse. Normally, I would

For only with the deepest knowledge can one diagnose that most elusive of conditions: the truth.

fuchsia-blooming crape myrtle trees, which are tended

CNN, okay? They came at night and beat down the doors. All

down to brass tacks. What have you

There have been times I would have given anything for such faith, for the belief that divine justice exists somewhere in the universe. Facing Sarah's death without it was an existential baptism of fire. The comfort that belief in an afterlife can provide was obvious in the hospital waiting rooms and chemo wards, where

Faith is something you have or you don't, and to pretend you do in the hope of gaining some last-minute dispensation from a being whose existence you have denied all your life goes against everything I am. I have never placed myself above God. I simply cannot find within myself the capacity for belief.

Caitlin is right, although her argument would probably offend every woman on the jury.

And a man who does nothing during a crisis is as bad as a man who causes one.