Greg Iles Quotes

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.

Man is the universe becoming conscious of itself.

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,

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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

Out country's messed up son. Mortally wounded. And I can't for the life of me se how we're going to heal it. Your generation can't do it. Even you're too old. The new ones coming along...that's where the hope lies, if there is any. We've got to acknowledge what we did to those people. But I don't think we ever will. People hate admitting guilt, but we can't blame it all on the Knoxes of the world. We're all guilty. Blacks are messed up, too...but how could they not be? White people fight this so hard because they know the truth in their bones. You know? You don't get that angry unless you know you're wrong.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Southern Gothic is alive and well. It's not just a genre, it is a way of life.

Some things we must pass over in silence.

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.

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

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

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.

into another identity. And I

A man's biggest enemy is his mouth.

My clearest memory of Ferriday is driving over to sit in the decaying old Arcade theater in 1978, because unlike Natchez's conservative theaters, the Arcade was showing Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter. To this day, I believe the Arcade owners booked the film because they thought it was a movie about deer hunting, not Vietnam. The Concordia Beacon

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

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.

carefully negotiated his way

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Men fantasize about wanton women, but when they meet one, they're paralyzed by fear.

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

Kaiser and Lenz are staring at each other like hunters who have walked into a thicket after a lion and found a unicorn.

Einstein said the arrow of time flies in only one direction. Faulkner, being from Mississippi, understood the matter differently. He said the past is never dead; it's not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose provenance dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always.

And who among us, offered the chance, would not relive the day or hour in which we first knew love, or ecstasy, or made a choice that forever altered our future, negating a life we might have had? Such chances are rarely granted. Memory and grief prove Faulkner right enough, but Einstein knew the finality of action. If I cannot change what I had for lunch yesterday, I certainly cannot unmake a marriage, erase the betrayal of a friend, or board a ship that left port twenty years ago.

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.

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.

Thought like that showed me the needless ambiguity of words like space-time. The average person heard a word like that and figured he'd never understand it. But it was so simple. Every place you ever saw was linked to a specific time ... the school you visited twenty years after you graduated, the football field you played on, the track you ran -- none of them was the same. If they were, you would collide with the generations that had run on them before and after you. The lover you kissed was not the same person he or she was sixty seconds before. In that minute, a million skin cells had died and been replaced by new ones. The smallest slices of space-time separated thought from action Life from death.

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.

the embarrassment

fervent, will not cure the afflicted. Nor

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

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.

There is always something.

Even chitlins smell good to a starving man.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 ...

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.