James Lee Burke Quotes

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

There's nothing like rejection to make you do an inventory of yourself. ~ James Lee Burke

Never read bad stuff if you're an artist; it will impair your own game. ~ 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

If you don't compromise your gift, if you write each day as well as you can, and then submit your work and not worry about it and go on to the next piece, you suddenly find oddly enough that you're no more interested in the applause than the silence. You don't hear either one of them. You can never listen to the naysayers. If you do you won't survive. ~ James Lee Burke

Every rejection is incremental payment on your dues that in some way will be translated back into your work. ~ James Lee Burke

But the participants [in war] never forgot the details of their experience, and like the Wandering Jew, they were condemned to remain their own history books, each containing a story they could not pass on to others and from which no one would learn anything of value. ~ 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

But no one could say he hadn't gotten even. He could not count the field women whom he had sexually degraded and demoralized and in whom he had left his seed so their bastard children would be a daily visual reminder of what a plantation white man could do to a plantation black woman whenever he wanted, nor could he count the black men whom he had made fear his blackjack as they would fear Satan himself, making each of them a lifetime enemy of all white people. ~ 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

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

When a man molests a woman or girl, he steals her identity. You don't know who you are anymore. You don't have an address or a home. You're nothing.
It's like a stain you can't wash out of your soul ~ James Lee Burke

Louisiana is a fresh-air mental asylum. ~ James Lee Burke

Don't undo a brave and noble deed. Don't rob yourself of your own virtue. ~ 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

We gain no wisdom by imposing our way on others. ~ James Lee Burke

I used to know a carnival man turned preacher who said the key to his success was understanding the people of what he called Snake's Navel, Arkansas. He said in Snake's Navel, the biggest thing going on Saturday night was the Dairy Queen. He said you could get the people there to do damn near anything
pollute their own water, work at five-dollar-an-hour jobs, drive fifty miles to a health clinic
as long as you packaged it right. That meant you gave them a light show and faith healings and blow-down-the-walls gospel music with a whole row of American flags across the stage. He said what they liked best, though
what really got them to pissing all over themselves
was to be told it was other people going to hell and not them. He said people in Snake's Navel wasn't real fond of homosexuals and Arabs and Hollywood Jews, although he didn't use them kinds of terms in his sermons. ~ 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

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

I long ago became convinced that the most reliable source for arcane and obscure and seemingly unobtainable information does not lie with the government or law enforcement agencies. Apparently neither the CIA nor the military intelligence apparatus inside the Pentagon had even a slight inkling of the Soviet Union's impending collapse, right up to the moment the Kremlin's leaders were trying to cut deals for their memoirs with New York publishers. Or, if a person really wishes a lesson in the subjective nature of official information, he can always call the IRS and ask for help with his tax forms, then call back a half hour later and ask the same questions to a different representative. So where do you go to find a researcher who is intelligent, imaginative, skilled in the use of computers, devoted to discovering the truth, and knowledgeable about science, technology, history, and literature, and who usually works for dirt and gets credit for nothing? After lunch I drove to the city library on Main and asked the reference librarian to find what she could on Junior Crudup. ~ James Lee Burke

And every good artist knows that the gift comes from somewhere else, and it's there for a reason, and that's to make the world a better place. ~ James Lee Burke

All drunks, particularly those who grew up in alcoholic homes, have that same sense of angst and trepidation, one that has no explainable origins. The fear is not necessarily self-centered, either. It's like watching someone point a revolver at his temple while he cocks and dry-fires the mechanism, over and over again, until the cylinder rotates a loaded chamber into firing position. ~ James Lee Burke

I would almost forget about Ida Durbin. But a sin of omission, if indeed that's what it was, can be like the rusty head of a hatchet buried in the heartwood of a tree
it eventually finds the teeth of a whirling saw blade. ~ 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

Age is a peculiar kind of thief. It slips up on you and steps inside your skin and is so quiet and methodical in its work that you never realize it has stolen your youth until you look into the mirror one morning and see a man you don't recognize. ~ 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

Don't ever quit. Never quit. Never show anybody you're hurt. Grin and walk through the cannon smoke. It will drive them up the wall. You always stay true to your own principles. You always believe in your gift. God doesn't make mistakes when he presents someone with a gift like that. It's there for a reason. Tell the naysayers, those who reject you, to drop dead! Who cares? ~ James Lee Burke

When people make a contract with the devil and give him an air-conditioned office to work in, he doesn't go back home easily. ~ 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

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

Young people ... who were casually profane, as though the validation of their own power could be achieved only by their assault on the sensibilities of others. ~ James Lee Burke

The real gladiators of the world are so humble in their origins and unremarkable in appearance that when we stand next to them in a grocery-store line, we never guess how brightly their souls can burn in the dark. ~ 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

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

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

The Homeric Epic does not have to be discovered inside a book; it begins just west of Fort Worth and extends all the way to Santa Monica. Wayfaring Stranger Pg. 415 ~ James Lee Burke

Big as a horse turd floating in a milk shake.
Wyatt Dixson ~ 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

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

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

If you put somebody on a crack pipe and give them a 9 mm Baretta, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what's going to happen next. ~ James Lee Burke

I told myself I did not have to live as I once did. I did not have to re-create the violent moments that used to come aborning like a sulfurous match flaring off a thumbnail. ~ James Lee Burke

My experience has been that grief and loss do not necessarily become more acceptable with time, and commitment to them is of no value to either the living or the dead. ~ James Lee Burke

Age is a clever thief. It takes a little from you each day, so you're not aware of your loss until it'd irreversible. ~ James Lee Burke

You do it a day at a time. You write as well as you can, you put it in the mail, you leave it under submission, you never leave it at home. ~ 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

I leaned back in my chair, my fingers laced behind my head, and wondered at the complexities and contradictions that must have existed in the earth's original clay when God first scooped it up in His palms. ~ James Lee Burke

There are not many places left in the United States where people can get off the computer, stop filing tax returns, and in effect become invisible. The rain forests in the Cascades and parts of West Montana come to mind, and perhaps the 'Glades still offer hope to those who wish to resign from modern times. The other place is the Atchafalaya Basin. ~ 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 wrong people always worry. The people who are the real problem never worry about anything. ~ James Lee Burke

You do it a day at a time. You just put your rejection slips in a shoebox and tell yourself one day you're going to autograph them and sell them at auction. ~ James Lee Burke

There may be room in government service for the altruist and the iconoclast, but I have yet to see one who was not treated as an oddity at best and at worst an object of suspicion and fear. ~ James Lee Burke

As a revolutionary people, we Americans won a probable victory over the best and biggest army in the world because we learned to fight from the Indians. You can do a lot of damage with a Kentucky rifle from behind a tree. You don't put on a peaked hat and a red coat and white leggings and crossed white bandoleers with a big silver buckle in the center of the X and march uphill into a line of Howitzers loaded with chain and chopped horseshoes. ~ 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

Write for the love of your art. Someplace down the road, the money, the fame, they'll come, but by that time you won't be thinking in terms of money or fame. ~ 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

I read a poem once that had a line in it about a white radiance that stains eternity. ~ James Lee Burke

Maggie's face darkened, as ~ 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

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

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

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

No, I'm a coonass, my religion is shaky, and I've never hit the juice. ~ 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

God bless the Reference Librarians ~ James Lee Burke

As I was to learn, patience and latitude and even humility are, paradoxically, the handmaidens of wealth, because virtue is costly only for those who own nothing else. ~ 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

Then I saw the consuming nature of her fear, her willingness to believe that exploitative charlatans could change her fate or really cared what happened to her, the dread and angst that congealed like a cold vapor around her heart when she awoke each morning, one day closer to the injection table at Angola. ~ 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

If you're wired a certain way, you'll always be in morion, clicking to your own rhythm, all of it in four-four time, avoiding convention and predictability and control as you would a sickness, the whole world waiting for you like an enormous dance pavilion lit by colored lights and surrounded with palm trees. I'm not talking about the dirty boogie. The music of the spheres is right outside your bedroom window. ~ James Lee Burke

Soldiers who return from foreign battlefields with a syndrome that survivors of the Great War called the thousand-yard stare. ~ 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

He was riding back through a doorway in time to a place that had nothing to do with the airplanes, and motorized vehicle and telephones wires, and radios that surrounded him now ... The woods in late autumn had become his private sun dappled cathedral, one that contained presences antithetical to the conventional notion of a church. ~ James Lee Burke

Humility is not a virtue in a writer, it is an absolute necessity. ~ James Lee Burke

We all have an extended family, people whom we recognize as our own as soon as we see them. ~ 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

Colored or not, we all work for the white man's cotton ... ~ 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

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

Forget morality tales and all the fury and mire of human complexity, and follow the money. It will lead you through urban legends about sex and revenge and jealousy and the acquisition of power over others, but ultimately, it will lead you to the issue from which all the other motivations derive - money, piles of it, green and lovely and cascading like leaves out of a beneficent sky, money and money and money, the one item that human beings will go to any lengths to acquire. ~ James Lee Burke

I guess that seems like an absurd premise until we consider the possibility that the dead are always with us, beckoning from the shade, reminding us that we're actors in the same drama they have already lived and that they can help us with our lives if we will only let them. ~ 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

She wondered if this were what hell was about. Not a place of punishment but of disparity. Those who had done nothing to earn their fate lived like this, while three miles away, others rode the Ferris wheel and children raised their hands joyfully to a hot-air balloon that rained down candy on their heads. ~ 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

Money can't buy happiness but it'll sure keep a mess of grief off your front porch.
~ James Lee Burke

Somehow sleep allows us to see clearly those very things that are obscured by the light of day. ~ 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

It's always today, Jim, and it's just going to get better and better, I said. ~ 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 bet that guy could steal the stink off of shit ~ 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

I also figured out that what we call our destiny is usually determined by two or three casual decisions which on the surface seem about as important as spitting your gum through a sewer grate.
(The Night Johnny Ace Died) ~ 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

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

Then an event happened that caused him to wonder at the great folly that seemed to govern his life, namely, his attempts to plan and control his future. Most of the events that changed his life had taken place without his consent and at the time had seemed of little consequence. Our destiny didn't lie in the stars, he told himself, or even in our mettle. It lay in our ability to recognize a gift when it was placed in your hands. ~ James Lee Burke

The best moments in life are not the kind many historians record. ~ 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