Greg Iles Quotes & Sayings

Elbowed Danny. You think Shields is the father of that baby? — Greg Iles

He always reminded us that every atom in our bodies was once part of a distant star that had exploded. He talked about how evolution moves from simplicity toward complexity, and how human intelligence is the highest known expression of evolution. I remember him telling me that a frog's brain is much more complex than a star. He saw human consciousness as the first neuron of the universe coming to life and awareness. A spark in the darkness, waiting to spread to fire. — Greg Iles

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

Don't keep a girl guessing too long, or she'll find the answer somewhere else. — Greg Iles

Her touch was as knowing and confident as her eyes, and as she focused all her attention upon me, I remembered that there is nothing so thrilling as a woman of words when she decides that the time for words is past. — Greg Iles

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. — Greg Iles

Path of least resistance, or the walk over hot coals. — Greg Iles

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

We're all terrified by rattlesnakes, but the spider we brush off our sleeve with hardly a thought is far more likely to hurt us. — Greg Iles

Just because you will not see the work completed does not mean you are free not to take it up. — Greg Iles

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

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. — Greg Iles

At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst. - Aristotle — Greg Iles

I like taking a character at the most intense moments of their lives and exploring all that in full and then moving on. — Greg Iles

He had never seen such eyes before, not even in the faces of soldiers unmanned in the midst of great carnage. Eyes like black mirrors, at once shallow and bottomless. He had the feeling that if he pressed his finger to one of those eyes, it would shatter and fall inward through a black cavern of grief and loss that could never be filled. — Greg Iles

I deal with the human psychology and evil. They are my twin issues. — Greg Iles

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? — Greg Iles

McCrae was the kind of southerner who had only left the parish of his birth to serve his country in wartime or to carry bulls across the state for mating purposes. — Greg Iles

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. — Greg Iles

...yet he [Levon] somehow sings with the wounded humanity of a man without a tribe, a man who has known both love and grief and understands that one is the price of the other. — Greg Iles

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. — Greg Iles

Because death is the end, and if a man doesn't speak before it silences him, then the things he holds closest die with him. — Greg Iles

You can't build happiness on someone else's pain. — Greg Iles

God is all powerful.
God is good.
Evil exists.
You can reconcile any two of those statements, but not all three. — Greg Iles

the embarrassment — Greg Iles

The colonel had a single vice - whiskey - and he looked forward to the anesthetic burn of the Kentucky bourbon with sublime anticipation. — Greg Iles

There is always something. — Greg Iles

Because I expected so little, Gaines's painting is startlingly powerul. A lank-haired blond woman with a hard face sits at akitchen table in the harsh light of a bare bulb. She's surrounded by dirty cereal bowls and fast-food bags, and her shirt is open to the waist, revealing small sagging breasts. Her hollow eyes look out from the canvas with the sullen resignation of an animal that has helped build its own cage. — Greg Iles

The South is the home of 'an eye for an eye.' 'Turning the other cheek'? The South can't see that. — Greg Iles

Rumor runs through the community like a plague, and truth is the first casualty. — Greg Iles

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

As I turned toward it, a premonitory wave of heat flashed across my neck and shoulders, and I felt the dry itch of the past rubbing against the present. — Greg Iles

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

When you drive down Cemetery Road, the angel appears to be looking directly at you. Yet once you pass the monument and look back over your shoulder, the angel is still looking at you. Thus the appellation: the Turning Angel. — Greg Iles

As we move, a roar like the voice of some satanic creature bellows from the staircase. The fire's voice. I've heard it in lots of places, and the sound turns my insides to jelly. There's a reason human beings will jump ten floors onto concrete to escape being burned alive. That roar is part of it. — Greg Iles

into another identity. And I — Greg Iles

If a man lived long enough, his past would always overtake him, no matter how fast he ran or how morally he tried to live subsequently. And how men dealt with that law ultimately revealed their true natures. — Greg Iles

When everything is at risk, good judgment, not haste, makes the difference between life and death. Panic is the enemy. — Greg Iles

'See Spot run!' is a perfect sentence in some ways. But I doubt the critics would say it was. — Greg Iles

Experiences are like hoarded gold. Whenever I dole out a piece of my private suffering, that is when I get letters from all over the world. — Greg Iles

My ancestors fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War; I was raised in Natchez, Miss.; I performed in the Confederate Pageant for a decade; I dug ditches and loaded trucks with black men who taught me more than any book ever could; and I graduated from Ole Miss. Anyone who survived that is a de facto expert on the South. — Greg Iles

For once the stone hits the surface of the pond, the ripples never really stop. — Greg Iles

The larger world lay not across oceans but within the human mind and heart. — Greg Iles

Any person who wants to govern the world is by definition the wrong person to do it. — Greg Iles

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. — Greg Iles

Sooner or later. It had better be sooner. Later is like the horizon; it recedes as you approach. — Greg Iles

I will do those things which make me happy today and which I can also live with ten years from now. — Greg Iles

treachery, weakness, envy, fanaticism - the most destructive forces available to man. — Greg Iles

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. — Greg Iles

Man is the universe becoming conscious of itself. — Greg Iles

My favorite book is The Mysterious Island. I order my books from a flimsy catalog the teacher hands out to every student in the class. Emil and the Detectives. White Fang. Like that. Money is tight for us, but when it comes to books my mother is a spendthrift; I can order as many as I like. I sit here day after day, waiting for my books to arrive. My books. It takes a month or more, but when they finally do, when the teacher opens the big box and passes out the orders to the kids, checking the books against a form taken from her desk, I glow with happiness. I've never had the newest dress, or the prettiest, but I always have the tallest stack of books. Little paperbacks that smell of wet ink. I lay my cheek against their cool covers, anticipating the stories inside, knowing all the other girls wonder what I could possibly want with those books. — Greg Iles

My father has always been the heart of my Penn Cage novels. — Greg Iles

Whenever life gets too good, whenever fate hands you something wonderful, something else gets taken away. — Greg Iles

Greed, apathy, hubris - even loyalty - all demand payment in the end. Storms will always come, and men will always do evil in the shadow of some other word. — Greg Iles

Some things we must pass over in silence. — Greg Iles

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. — Greg Iles

My father served as an Army doctor in West Germany in the late '50s and early '60s. As a result, he and my mother - both native southerners - were acutely aware of what had happened during the Holocaust. — Greg Iles

Even chitlins smell good to a starving man. — Greg Iles

You never wear red to no funeral; red says the dead person was a fool. — Greg Iles

The evil prosper, and the innocent pay the bills for them. — Greg Iles

A man walks the straight and narrow all his life; he follows the rules, stays within the lines; then one day he makes a misstep. He crosses a line and sets in motion a chain of events that will take from him everything he has and damn him forever in the eyes of those he loves. — Greg Iles

The Terrible Truth is that brutality is part of human nature, and all the laws in the world can't neuter it. — Greg Iles

PET scan and gene therapy. "I need you — Greg Iles

hair. He's bald now. But he still looks like he could ride a bull ragged." I jump at the sound of the garage door. Mom gives me a little wave, then crosses the kitchen as silently as if she were floating on a magic carpet and disappears down the hall. Moments later, my father walks through the kitchen door, his face drawn and tired. "I figured you'd be waiting for me." "Dad, we've got to talk." Dread seems to seep from the pores in his face. "Let me get a drink. I'll meet you in the library. — Greg Iles

We do not just belong to this universe, we are it. — Greg Iles

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. — Greg Iles

The stillest thing in the world is the corpse of someone you loved. A hunk of cold granite seems more alive than a dead human being. You don't expect a stone to move. A person robbed of all motion and cold to the touch is the most alien object in the world. Natural instinct drives us away from the decaying body, and quickly. Yet love compels us forward, to kiss the empty vessel of the soul departed. ...Lesson two: there are many fates worse than death. The most common is surviving the death of a loved one. For the dead, all questions have been answered or made irrelevant. For the survivor, some questions have been rendered unanswerable. — Greg Iles

We judge and punish based on facts, but facts are not truth. Facts are like a buried skeleton uncovered long after death. Truth is fluid. Truth is alive. To know the truth requires understanding, the most difficult human art. It requires seeing all things at once, forward and backward, the way God sees. — Greg Iles

The truth is rarely pure and never simple. - Oscar Wilde — Greg Iles

The mills of the gods grind slowly....but they grind to dust. — Greg Iles

Wingate sighs thoughtfully. "Hard to say. He's not static. He began with almost pure Impressionism, which is dead. Anyone can do it. But the vision was there. Between the fifth and twelfth paintings, he began to evolve something much more fascinating. Are you familiar with the Nabis?"
The what?"
Nabis. It means 'prophets.' Bonnard, Denis, Vuillard?"
What I know about art wouldn't fill a postcard."
Don't blame yourself. That's the American educational system. They simply don't teach it. Not unless you beg for it. Not even in university. — Greg Iles

Mothers are fonder than fathers of their children, because they're more certain they are their own. — Greg Iles

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

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 — Greg Iles

Did the fact that Martin Luther King diddled all those women change what he did for his people? Or Franklin Roosevelt? General Eisenhower? Not one whit. Men are men, and gods are for storybooks. And if you've read your Edith Hamilton or Jane Harrison - or the Old Testament, for that matter - you'll know that gods acted like men most of the time, or worse. — Greg Iles

I don't really understand the world anymore. But maybe there's some faint hope that the good people on both sides can come together. — Greg Iles

change my conviction. — Greg Iles

The irrevocable events of our lives happen in seconds, sometimes fractions of seconds. — Greg Iles

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, — Greg Iles

Mississippi blood is different. It's got some river in it. Delta soil, turpentine, asbestos, cotton poison. But there's strength in it, too. Strength that's been beat but not broke. — Greg Iles

My mother, a teacher, encouraged me to use my creativity as an actual way to make a living, and my father, a Mississippi physician, did two things. First, he taught me that all human beings should be treated equally because no one is better than anyone else, and he never pressured me to become a doctor. — Greg Iles

And I do have one surefire plot I have not and probably never will write because of my fear someone will carry it out. — Greg Iles

You know, the truth isn't hard to find, if you're willing to get your hands dirty. Truth waits just under the surface for any man brave enough to scrape a little dirt away. But most people are too afraid or too lazy to get dirty. They're afraid to ask the right questions. The hard questions. — Greg Iles

All partnerships fail in the end, just like marriages. The only life after death any human being will ever know is staying in a marriage or a partnership after it's over. And that's not life - it's living death. — Greg Iles

For nothing is lost, nothing is ever lost. There is always the clue, the canceled check, the smear of lipstick, the footprint in the canna bed, the condom on the park path, the twitch in the old wound, the baby shoes dipped in bronze, the taint in the blood stream. And all times are one time, and all those dead in the past never lived before our definition gives them life, and out of the shadow their eyes implore us. - Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men — Greg Iles

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

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

A man's biggest enemy is his mouth. — Greg Iles

I have not written a perfect sentence, in the literary sense. It's a lot easier to throw a perfect pass than to write a perfect sentence, if that sentence is meant to perform more than a mechanical function. — Greg Iles

Darkness turned to noon. Even with the nose cone of the Learjet pointed away from the blast, the flash blinded everyone inside. Diaz lost control of the aircraft. It pitched over into a screaming, spinning dive, hurtling earthward at over five hundred miles per hour. In the cabin, people slammed into each other in the terror of flashblindness. General Steyn screamed in pain. Hauer half-fell past Burton into the cockpit. "Straighten up!" he screamed. — Greg Iles

carefully negotiated his way — Greg Iles

learned a long time ago, if you're going to wait for this world to be fair, you're going to be waiting in the grave. — Greg Iles

Let me tell you a secret, Caitlin. We're still in the cave. It's just bigger, and we wear nicer clothes. We make alliances and try to be civil, we save the weak instead of leaving them out in the cold to die ... — Greg Iles

I listened in amazement. You saw a face on an American street, or in an office, and you had no idea that a tragic epic lay behind it. — Greg Iles

Who gave of their time: Joe Files, MD, Rod Givens, MD, — Greg Iles

The temptation to second-guess is strong. But I must remember one thing.
Life is simple.
You are healthy or you are sick. You are faithful to your wife or you aren't. You are alive or you are dead.
I am alive. — Greg Iles

fervent, will not cure the afflicted. Nor — Greg Iles

Not far away lay the big cannons that had held Ulysses Grant at bay for fifty siege days while the citizens of the town ate rat flesh and clung to their long-cherished beliefs. How many had died in that lost cause? Dr. Tarver wondered. Fifty thousand casualties at Gettysburg alone, and for what? To free the slaves who built this house? To preserve the Union? Had Stonewall Jackson died to create a nation of couch potatoes ignorant of their own history and incapable of simple mathematics? If those brave soldiers in blue and gray had seen what lay in the future, they would have laid down their muskets and walked home to their farms. — Greg Iles

But as my mother always said: You never know what's cooking in someone else's pot. — Greg Iles

Like my best friend, I asked for drums for Christmas, and got them. But when he moved on to guitar, I realized two things: (1) guitar is a much more expressive instrument, (2) way more girls pay attention to guitar players than to drummers. — Greg Iles