James Lee Burke Quotes & Sayings

No, I'm a coonass, my religion is shaky, and I've never hit the juice. — James Lee Burke

The evening sky was streaked with purple, the color of torn plums, and a light rain had started to fall when I came to the end of the blacktop road that cut through twenty miles of thick, almost impenetrable scrub oak and pine and stopped at the front gate of Angola penitentiary. — James Lee Burke

What kind of trees are those?" I asked.
"Heartwood," my father said. "They grow in layers, like the spirit does. That's what Grandpa Sam used to say, anyway. You just got to keep the roots in a clear stream and not let nobody taint the water for you. — James Lee Burke

The wrong people always worry. The people who are the real problem never worry about anything. — James Lee Burke

No matter what occurs in your life, no matter how bad the circumstances seem to be, you must never consider a dishonorable act as a viable alternative. — James Lee Burke

The armies of the night are faceless and mindless and the modern equivalent of Visigoths, but when they have a leader, their time in history rolls around again. — James Lee Burke

No one likes to be afraid. Fear is the enemy of love & faith & it robs us of our sleep & our sunrise & makes us treacherous & venal& fills our glands with toxins & effaces our identity & gives flight to any vestige of self respect. If you have ever been afraid, truly afraid, in a way that makes your hair soggy with sweat & turns your skin gray & fouls your blood & spiritually eviscerates you to the point you cannot pray, lest your prayers be a concession to your conviction that you're about to die, you know what I am talking about. If you do not have the option of either fleeing or attacking your adversary, your level of fear will grow to the point where you feel like your skin is being stripped from your bones. — James Lee Burke

I had learned long ago that resolution by itself is not enough; we are what we do, not what we think and feel. — James Lee Burke

No matter what the other side does to you, you grin and walk through the cannon smoke. It drives them crazy. — James Lee Burke

Today, there are more opportunities for writers in terms of access to larger success, but it's more difficult to publish a literary novel in the lower ranges. In other words, you almost have to hit a home run. You can hit a triple, maybe, but nobody's interested in a single. — James Lee Burke

You don't have anything, you don't know anything, you're just a noise like a fart in somebody's pants, Segura said. — James Lee Burke

Hackberry Holland's greatest fear was his fellow man's propensity to act collectively, in militaristic lockstep, under the banner of God and country. Mobs did not rush across town to do good deeds, and in Hackberry's view, there was no more odious taint on any social or political endeavor than universal approval. — James Lee Burke

I had to feel sorry for Bubba's wife. In AA we called it denial. We take the asp to our breast and smile at the alarm we see in the eyes of others. — James Lee Burke

And I wonder if there is any way to adequately describe the folly that causes us to undo all the great gifts of both Earth and Heaven. — James Lee Burke

I used to save all my rejection slips because I told myself, one day I'm going to autograph these and auction them. And then I lost the box. — James Lee Burke

The winter was not really winter at all, and therein may lie Key West's greatest charm. If one does not have to brood upon the coming of winter and the shortening of the days and the fading of the light, then perhaps one does not have to brood upon the coming of death. When the season is gentle and untreatening and seems to renew itself daily, we come to believe that spring and the long days of summer may be eternal after all. When we see the light trapped high in the sky on a summer evening, is it possible we are looking through an aperture at our future rather than at a seasonal phenomenon? Is it possible that the big party is just beginning? — James Lee Burke

I would like to believe that there is a resolution in the human tragedy and that order can be reimposed upon the earth in the same way it occurs in the fifth act of the Elizabethan drama that supposedly mirrors our lives. My experience has been otherwise. History seldom corrects itself in its own sequence, and when we mete out justice, we often do it in a fashion that perpetuates the evil of the transgressors and breathes new life into the descendants of Cain. I would like to believe the instincts of the mob can be exorcised from the species or genetically bred out of it. But there is no culture in the history of the world that has not lauded its warriors over its mystics. Sometimes in an idle moment, I try to recall the names of five slaves out of the whole sorry history of human bondage whose lives we celebrate. I have never had much success. — James Lee Burke

You just got sprung."
"Nig Rosewater out there?" Clete asked.
"Nig Rosewater hasn't been up at this hour since World War II. — James Lee Burke

Sometimes when that kind of evil comes into our lives, we can't explain it, so we blame it on God or ourselves. In both cases we're wrong. Maybe it's time you let yourself out of prison. — James Lee Burke

Through the screen, he could smell the evening as though it were a living presence, the purple and yellow flowers in his yard and the dark green wetness of the fescue part of a song that was never supposed to die. Except he could feel things ending, coming apart at the center, and he didn't know why. — James Lee Burke

Is there a design in the events of our lives? Or do things just happen, much like a junk yard falling down a staircase? If it's the latter, how do you deal with it? — James Lee Burke

We get hurt worse by the people whom we care about. And they seldom mean to do it. That's what makes it so painful, kiddo. — James Lee Burke

I don't like to bust drunk drivers. I don't like to listen to their explanations, watch their pitiful attempts to affect sobriety, or see the sheen of fear break out in their eyes when they realize they're headed for the drunk tank with little to look forward to in the morning except the appearance of their names in the newspaper. Or maybe in truth I just don't like to see myself when I look into their faces. — James Lee Burke

If there is any human tragedy, there is only one, and it occurs when we forget who we are and remain silent while a stranger takes up residence inside our skin. — James Lee Burke

Varina was breathing hard through her nose, her face pinched, not unlike a child's. "You don't know how mad you can make people," she said. "I had tender feelings for you once, whether you knew it or not. But you're a shit, Dave Robicheaux. — James Lee Burke

Jimmie would forever be the Renaissance humanist, bearing his faith and optimism like a white light inside a chalice. — James Lee Burke

But every longtime cop will tell you that the criminals who scared him most were the ones who looked and talked like the rest of us and committed deeds that no one, absolutely no one, ever wants to have knowledge of. Five — James Lee Burke

In a badass, beer-glass brawl, would you rather have an academic liberal covering your back or a hobnailed redneck? — James Lee Burke

Deviants and monsters ran the camps where families were sent up the chimney or turned into bars of soap, but they would have been powerless without the clerks who sat anonymously behind typewriters and gave them bureaucratic legitimacy. — James Lee Burke

My experience with age it instills a degree of patience in some, leaves the virtuous spiritually unchanged, feeds the character defects in others, and brings little wisdom to any of us. — James Lee Burke

I'm over the hill for come-on lines. On a quiet day, I can hear my liver rotting. For exercise, I fall down. ~ Clete — James Lee Burke

As a police officer it has been my experience that pedophiles are able to operate and stay functional over long periods of time and victimize scores, even hundreds, of children, because no one wants to believe his or her own intuitions about the symptoms in the perpetrator. — James Lee Burke

The system shaves the dice on the side of those with money and power, and anyone who believes otherwise deserves anything that happens to him. — James Lee Burke

Hackberry tried to convince himself that Collins was dead, his body long ago eaten by coyotes or lost inside the bowels of the earth. Regardless, Hackberry told himself, Collins belonged in the past or the place in the collective unconscious where most demons had their origins. If evil was actually a separate and self-sustaining entity, he thought, its manifestation was in the nationalistic wars that not only produced the greatest suffering but always became lionized as patriotic events. — James Lee Burke

It's funny what can happen when you lay bare the heart and join the Earth's old dance through the heavens. — James Lee Burke

Colored or not, we all work for the white man's cotton ... — James Lee Burke

Writing is like being in love. You never get better at it or learn more about it. The day you think you do is the day you lose it. Robert Frost called his work a lover's quarrel with the world. It's ongoing. It has neither a beginning nor an end. You don't have to worry about learning things. The fire of one's art burns all the impurities from the vessel that contains it. — James Lee Burke

My experience has been that people who die for causes have few friends in death. — James Lee Burke

If we break promises to God, shouldn't we be allowed an occasional violation of our word to our friends and superiors? — James Lee Burke

God bless the Reference Librarians — James Lee Burke

Night Comes to the Cumberland. — James Lee Burke

I looked at Lucas with the pang that a parent feels when he knows his child will be hurt and that it's no one's fault and that to try to preempt the rites of passage is an act of contempt for the child's courage. — James Lee Burke

There's another way to put it. Sometimes your luck runs out and you have to accept that the life you planned was a dream written on water. — James Lee Burke

When you find the right people, you never let go. The people who count are the ones who are your friends in lean times. You have all the friends you want when things are going well. — James Lee Burke

A lie is an act of theft. It steals peoples faith and makes them resent themselves — James Lee Burke

God bless the world — James Lee Burke

And I suppose that what I have learned is a lesson that the years, or self-concern, had begun to hide from me, namely, that the bravest and most loyal and loving people in the world seldom have heroic physical characteristics or the auras of saints. In fact, their faces are like those of people whom you might randomly pull out of a supermarket line, their physical makeup so nondescript and unremarkable that it's hard to remember what they look like ten minutes after they walk out of a room. — James Lee Burke

There are certain kinds of currency you acquire in life. Most of it is ephemeral. But friendship and faith in the unseen world and the commitment to be true unto thine own self are the human glue that you never give up, not for any reason. — James Lee Burke

The photographs of the inmates at Bergen-Belsen or Andersonville Prison or the bodies in the ditch at My Lai disturb us in a singular fashion because those instances of egregious human cruelty were committed for the most part by baptized Christians. — James Lee Burke

Sometimes he comes to me in my dreams, and I wonder if ironically all our stories were written on his skin back there in Texas City in 1947. Or maybe that's just poetic illusion purchased by time. But even in the middle of an Indian summer's day, when the sugarcane is beaten with purple and gold light in the fields and the sun is both warm and cool on your skin at the same time, when I know that the earth is a fine place after all, I have to mourn just a moment for those people of years ago who lived lives they did not choose, who carried burdens that were not their own, whose invisible scars were as private as the scarlet beads of Sister Roberta's rosary wrapped across the back of her small hand, as bright as drops of blood ringed round the souls of little people. — James Lee Burke

Tomorrow has no more existence than yesterday, but you can always control now. We live in a series of nows. Think about now. — James Lee Burke

WHEN ISHMAEL WOKE, the walls of his trench were seeping water and the dawn was colder than it should have been, the sky an unnatural and ubiquitous pale color that had less to do with the rising of the sun than the passing of the night. — James Lee Burke

Application when it comes to understanding the mysteries of creation or the fact that light can enter the eye and form an image in the brain and send a poetic tendril down the arm into a clutch of fingers that could write the Shakespearean sonnets. — James Lee Burke

If I've learned anything at all from my years, it's the simple lesson that human beings are always more complicated, brave, long-suffering, and, ultimately, heroic than we ever guessed, and that none of us completely understands another, no matter how intimate we are with them. — James Lee Burke

As a southerner I had been brought up to believe that through conditioning and experience you could accept with some measure of tranquility any of the flaws in the human situation. But death is one flaw that always lands like a fist in the center of the forehead. No matter how many times you see it, or smell its gray rotting odor, or come close to buying it yourself, each time is always like the first. No amount of earlier experience prepares you for it, and after it happens the world is somehow unfairly diminished and bent out of shape. — James Lee Burke

Never read bad stuff if you're an artist; it will impair your own game. — James Lee Burke

It has been my experience that most human stories are circular rather than linear. Regardless of the path we choose, we somehow end up where we commenced - in part, I suspect, because the child who lives in us goes along for the ride. — James Lee Burke

A category 5 hurricane carries an explosive force several times greater than that of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. — James Lee Burke

Did you ever see a mob rush across town to do a good deed? Dave Robicheaux — James Lee Burke

I also believe my home state is cursed by ignorance and poverty and racism, much of it deliberately inculcated to control a vulnerable electorate. And I believe many of the politicians in Louisiana are among the most stomach-churning examples of white trash and venality I have ever known. To me, the fact that large numbers of people find them humorously picaresque is mind numbing, on a level with telling fond tales of one's rapist. — James Lee Burke

Some people say you pick up the Dirty Boogie where you left it off. Others say you pick it up where you would have been had you never gotten off it. — James Lee Burke

... He has finally learned that lying to oneself is an offense for which human beings seldom grant themselves absolution.
He comes to believe that acceptance of a wintry place in the soul and a refusal to speak about it to others is as much consolation as a man gets, and for some odd reason that thought seems to bring him peace. — James Lee Burke

To misuse one's talent, to be cavalier about it, to set it aside because of fear or sloth is unpardonable. — James Lee Burke

I hit him so hard spittle and blood flew from his mouth onto a woman's blouse four feet away. I drove my fist into his kidney, a blow that made his back arch as though his spine had been broken, then I hooked him with a left below the eye and drove a right cross into his jaw that knocked him across a folding table. — James Lee Burke

Whenever I hear and see a politician or a military leader, a bank of American flags at his back, trying to convince us of the rightness of a policy or a deed that will cause harm to others; when I am almost convinced myself that setting humanitarian concern in abeyance can be justified in the interest of a greater good, I pause and ask myself what my brain-smoked friends would have to say. — James Lee Burke

Then millions of lights came on in the canyons, along the freeways, and through the vast sweep of the Los Angeles basin, and it was almost as if you were looking down upon the end point of the American dream, a geographical poem into which all our highways eventually led, a city of illusion founded by conquistadors and missionaries and consigned to the care of angels, where far below the spinning propellers of our seaplane black kids along palm-tree-lined streets in Watts hunted each other with automatic weapons. — James Lee Burke

I had found the edge. The place where you unstrap all your fastenings to the earth, to what you are what you have been, where you flame out on the edge of the spheres, and the sun and moon become eclipsed and the world below is as dead and remote and without interest as if it were glazed with ice. — James Lee Burke

All our dreams and hopes become as naught, and evil men are allowed to hang their lanterns on our tombstones. What greater folly is there? — James Lee Burke

I would start with four fingers of Jack in a thick mug, with a sweating Budweiser back, and by midnight I would be alone at the end of the bar, armed, drunk, and hunched over my glass, morally and psychologically insane. — James Lee Burke

Salish Kootenai College — James Lee Burke

Fear is an irrational emotion that floats from object to object like a helium balloon that you touch with your fingertips. — James Lee Burke

The air smelled like Bayou Teche when it's spring and the fish are spawning among the water hyacinths and the frogs are throbbing in the cattails and the flooded cypress. — James Lee Burke

Neither our own passing nor the passing of an era is a tragedy, no matter how much we would like to think it is. — James Lee Burke

Those who live with insomnia and who consider sleep both an enemy and a gift will understand the following. Some of us cannot comprehend how anyone except the very good or those who have no conscience at all can sleep from dark to dawn without dreaming or waking. We hear William Blake's tiger padding softly through a green jungle, his stripes glowing, his whiskers spotted with gore. Psychoanalysis does no good. Neither does a health regimen that induces physical exhaustion. The only solution that is guaranteed is the one provided by our old friend Morpheus, who requires our souls in the bargain. — James Lee Burke

A tanker truck appeared far down the wavy surface of the highway, headlights on, its weight and shimmering cylindrical shape and dedicated purpose so great and unrelenting that it seemed to move and jitter against the sun's afterglow without sound or mechanically driven power, sustained by its own momentum, as though the truck had a destiny that had been planned long ago. — James Lee Burke

THE SUN HAD just crested on the horizon like a misplaced planet, swollen and molten and red, lighting a landscape that seemed sculpted out of clay and soft stone and marked by the fossilized tracks of animals with no names, when a tall barefoot man wearing little more than rags dropped his horse's reins and eased himself off the horse's back and worked his way down an embankment into a riverbed chained with pools of water that glimmered as brightly as blood in the sunrise. — James Lee Burke

Prosecutors often wince when they have to take a child abuser to trial, because usually the only witnesses they can use are children who are terrified at the prospect of testifying against their parents. — James Lee Burke

I sometimes subscribe to the belief that all historical events occur simultaneously, like a dream in the mind of God. Perhaps it is only man who views time sequentially and tries to impose a solar calendar upon it. What if other people, both dead and unborn, are living out their lives in the same space we occupy, without our knowledge or consent?
The Glass Rainbow, p. 138 — James Lee Burke

Hy is it that in problematic situations almost everyone resorts to axioms and societal remedies that in actuality almost nobody believes in? ... ask yourself, have you ever known anyone whose marriage was saved by a marriage counselor, whose drinking was cured by a psychiatrist, whose son was kept out of reform school by a social worker? — James Lee Burke

Then she walked away, like Helen of Troy turning her back on Attica. A gust of warm wind blew newspapers along the boulevard into the sky. The light was orange and bleeding out of the clouds in the west, the horizon darkening, the waves crashing on the beach just the other side of Seawall Boulevard, the palm trees rattling dryly in the wind. I could smell the salt and the seaweed and the tiny shellfish that had dried on the beach, like the smell of birth. I — James Lee Burke

The best moments in life are not the kind many historians record. — James Lee Burke

Administrators don't believe in conspiracies. If they did, they'd have to resign their jobs. That — James Lee Burke

The only thing an artist has to remember is to never lose faith in his vision. — James Lee Burke

There is no higher form of artistic expression then film — James Lee Burke

As flawed as Southern culture is, mendacity has always been treated in the South as a despicable characteristic. Notice how often Southerners casually address others as "you son of a bitch" with no insult intended. When the same person calls someone a "lying son of a bitch," you know he's serious. — James Lee Burke

In that moment, when watches and clocks misbehave and you feel a cold vapor wrap itself around your heart, you unconsciously draw a line at the bottom of a long column of numbers and come up with a sum. Perhaps it's one that fills you with contentment and endows you with a level of courage and an acceptance that you didn't know you possessed.
Or maybe not. — James Lee Burke

Thinking at night isn't good for anybody. — James Lee Burke

Who can make sense of the roles we play? If I could draw any conclusion about the long, depressing slog of human progress, it's the possibility that unseen elements lie just on the other side of the physical universe and that somehow we're actors on the stage of the Globe, right across the Thames from a place called Pissing Alley, whether William Shakespeare or Christopher Marlowe are aware of our presence or not. — James Lee Burke

People were not what they said. They were not what they thought. They were not what they promised. People were what they did. When the final tally was done, nothing else mattered. — James Lee Burke

The story of Ulysses and Agamemnon and Menelaus, of Jesus, of the Good Knight of Chaucer, lives in every one of us. — James Lee Burke

But perhaps age has taught me that the earth is still new, molten at the core and still forming, that black leaves in the winter forest will crawl with life in the spring, that our story is ongoing and it is indeed a crime to allow the heart's energies to dissipate with the fading of light on the horizon. I can't be sure. I brood upon it and sleep little. I wait like a denied lover for the blue glow of dawn. — James Lee Burke

Don't undo a brave and noble deed. Don't rob yourself of your own virtue. — James Lee Burke

I believe every ... man remembers the girl he thinks he should have married. She reappears to him in his lonely moments, or he sees her in the face of a young girl in the park, buying a snowball under an oak tree by the baseball diamond. But she belongs to back there, to somebody else, and that thought sometimes rends your heart in a way that you never share with anyone else. — James Lee Burke

Somehow sleep allows us to see clearly those very things that are obscured by the light of day. — James Lee Burke

How do you caution a fawn about a cigarette a motorist has just flipped from his car window into a patch of yellow grass, or tell a sparrow that winged creatures eventually plummet to earth? — James Lee Burke

There's no substitute for loyalty. — James Lee Burke

He wavin' at you, Dave. Hey, it's that drunk man done fell in the bayou the ot'er night. That man must surely love water. — James Lee Burke

THE ALLURE OF Montana is like a commitment to a narcotic; you can never use it up or get enough of it. Its wilderness areas probably resemble the earth on the first day of creation. — James Lee Burke

A wet cigarette butt clung to my cheek like a mashed cockroach. I could smell whiskey and beer in my clothes and Gable's blood on my knuckles and I swore I could taste whiskey surging out of my stomach into my throat, like an old friend who has come back in a time of need. — James Lee Burke

Colored or not, we all pick the white man's cotton. — James Lee Burke