Top 90 Greg Iles Quotes
#1. The Terrible Truth is that brutality is part of human nature, and all the laws in the world can't neuter it.
Greg Iles
#2. 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
#3. She's floating outside in the maternal holding pattern all women learn after they have children, one that serves them well after grandchildren come along.
Greg Iles
#4. A man's biggest enemy is his mouth.
Greg Iles
#5. her? I wonder. "Tom?" I say, taking advantage of
Greg Iles
#6. Who gave of their time: Joe Files, MD, Rod Givens, MD,
Greg Iles
#8. 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
#9. The larger world lay not across oceans but within the human mind and heart.
Greg Iles
#11. The evil prosper, and the innocent pay the bills for them.
Greg Iles
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. We do not just belong to this universe, we are it.
Greg Iles
#15. I don't say it was hard, because everybody got it hard, some way.
Greg Iles
#16. PET scan and gene therapy. "I need you
Greg Iles
#17. treachery, weakness, envy, fanaticism - the most destructive forces available to man.
Greg Iles
#18. I deal with the human psychology and evil. They are my twin issues.
Greg Iles
#19. My father has always been the heart of my Penn Cage novels.
Greg Iles
#20. At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst. - Aristotle
Greg Iles
#21. You never wear red to no funeral; red says the dead person was a fool.
Greg Iles
#22. When everything is at risk, good judgment, not haste, makes the difference between life and death. Panic is the enemy.
Greg Iles
#23. God is all powerful.
God is good.
Evil exists.
You can reconcile any two of those statements, but not all three.
Greg Iles
#24. For Sweden, the price of aiding the Allies could be fifty thousand uninvited guests
Greg Iles
#25. 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
#26. For once the stone hits the surface of the pond, the ripples never really stop.
Greg Iles
#27. Sooner or later. It had better be sooner. Later is like the horizon; it recedes as you approach.
Greg Iles
#28. There's nothing harder than fighting alone, with no one to keep you company in your foxhole.
Greg Iles
#29. 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
#30. ...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
#31. 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
#32. The South is the home of 'an eye for an eye.' 'Turning the other cheek'? The South can't see that.
Greg Iles
#33. 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
#35. Southern Gothic is alive and well. It's not just a genre, it is a way of life.
Greg Iles
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. The colonel had a single vice - whiskey - and he looked forward to the anesthetic burn of the Kentucky bourbon with sublime anticipation.
Greg Iles
#39. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. Mom covers the wrought-iron patio table with newspaper, and Dad dumps the steaming crawfish
Greg Iles
#45. The mills of the gods grind slowly....but they grind to dust.
Greg Iles
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. Mothers are fonder than fathers of their children, because they're more certain they are their own.
Greg Iles
#51. I will do those things which make me happy today and which I can also live with ten years from now.
Greg Iles
#52. 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
#53. You can't build happiness on someone else's pain.
Greg Iles
#54. 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
#55. Man is the universe becoming conscious of itself.
Greg Iles
#56. The truth is rarely pure and never simple. - Oscar Wilde
Greg Iles
#57. Even chitlins smell good to a starving man.
Greg Iles
#58. 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
#59. Just because you will not see the work completed does not mean you are free not to take it up.
Greg Iles
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. Men fantasize about wanton women, but when they meet one, they're paralyzed by fear.
Greg Iles
#64. 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
#65. between us. That night I prayed like a man trying to polish coal
Greg Iles
#66. The irrevocable events of our lives happen in seconds, sometimes fractions of seconds.
Greg Iles
#67. 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
#68. Don't keep a girl guessing too long, or she'll find the answer somewhere else.
Greg Iles
#69. But as my mother always said: You never know what's cooking in someone else's pot.
Greg Iles
#70. 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
#71. fervent, will not cure the afflicted. Nor
Greg Iles
#72. Elbowed Danny. You think Shields is the father of that baby?
Greg Iles
#73. Deer were damn good swimmers, though not many people knew it.
Greg Iles
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. Path of least resistance, or the walk over hot coals.
Greg Iles
#77. 'See Spot run!' is a perfect sentence in some ways. But I doubt the critics would say it was.
Greg Iles
#78. 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
#79. Kaiser and Lenz are staring at each other like hunters who have walked into a thicket after a lion and found a unicorn.
Greg Iles
#80. Whenever life gets too good, whenever fate hands you something wonderful, something else gets taken away.
Greg Iles
#81. IF A MAN is forced to choose between the truth and his father, only a fool chooses the truth.
Greg Iles
#82. 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
#83. Any person who wants to govern the world is by definition the wrong person to do it.
Greg Iles
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. Rumor runs through the community like a plague, and truth is the first casualty.
Greg Iles
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. Some things we must pass over in silence.
Greg Iles
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