Top 100 James Lee Burke Quotes
#1. Most criminals are stupid. They creep $500,000 homes in the Garden District, load up two dozen bottles of gin, whiskey, vermouth, and Collins mix in a $2,000 Irish linen tablecloth and later drink the booze and throw the tablecloth away.
James Lee Burke
#2. How do you explain to yourself the casual manner in which you threw your life away?
James Lee Burke
#3. Jimmie would forever be the Renaissance humanist, bearing his faith and optimism like a white light inside a chalice.
James Lee Burke
#5. Somehow sleep allows us to see clearly those very things that are obscured by the light of day.
James Lee Burke
#6. Every drunkard has many moments of shame that live like carpet tacks in his memory,
James Lee Burke
#7. 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
#8. Don't undo a brave and noble deed. Don't rob yourself of your own virtue.
James Lee Burke
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. I made her talk about her family, her home, her music, and her work, everything that defined who she was before Bobby Joe had touched her with his probing hands.
James Lee Burke
#12. Big as a horse turd floating in a milk shake.
Wyatt Dixson
James Lee Burke
#13. Humility is not a virtue in a writer, it is an absolute necessity.
James Lee Burke
#14. We all end up in the same place. Some sonner than others.
James Lee Burke
#15. ALL MEN HAVE a religion or totems of some kind. Even the atheist is committed to an enormous act of faith in his belief that the universe created itself and the subsequent creation of intelligent life was simply a biological accident.
James Lee Burke
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. This is Louisiana, Dave. Guatemala North. Quit pretending it's the United States. Life will make a lot more sense, he said.
James Lee Burke
#19. Saints don't heed warnings because they consider them irrelevant. Fools don't heed them because they think the lightning dancing across the sky, the thunder rolling through the woods, are only there to enhance their lives in some mysterious way.
James Lee Burke
#20. What happens outside of us doesn't count. That's something we don't have control over. It's what we do with it, the way that we react to it, that's important.
James Lee Burke
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. There's nothing like rejection to make you do an inventory of yourself.
James Lee Burke
#24. No matter what the other side does to you, you grin and walk through the cannon smoke. It drives them crazy.
James Lee Burke
#25. I wouldn't write anything autobiographical. If you've lived a life like Laurence of Arabia, it might be a consideration, but otherwise it's a little bit vain, it seems to me.
James Lee Burke
#26. The reason people don't buy conspiracy theories is they think 'conspiracy' means everybody's on the same program. That's not how it works. Everybody's got a different program. They just all want the same guy dead. Socrates was a gadfly, but I bet he took time out to screw somebody's wife.
James Lee Burke
#27. 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
#28. No, I'm a coonass, my religion is shaky, and I've never hit the juice.
James Lee Burke
#29. 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
#30. Using a first-person narrator is simply a matter of hearing the voice inside yourself.
James Lee Burke
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#39. 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
#40. Never read bad stuff if you're an artist; it will impair your own game.
James Lee Burke
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. There are events you witness, or in which you participate, that forever remain sacrosanct and inviolate in memory, no matter how painful that memory is, because of the cost that you or others paid in order to be there in that moment when the camera lens clicked shut.
James Lee Burke
#45. Colored or not, we all work for the white man's cotton ...
James Lee Burke
#46. Why do I always feel like you're trying to staple my umbilical cord to the corner of your desk?
James Lee Burke
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. The false dawn, with its illusions and mist-wrapped softness, can be as inadequate and fleeting as Morpheus' gifts. CHAPTER 2 The days became warmer the first week in April, and on some mornings I went out on the salt at dawn and seined
James Lee Burke
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. The only thing an artist has to remember is to never lose faith in his vision.
James Lee Burke
#54. 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
#56. 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
#58. Hope was the light that allowed man to prevail in the worst of circumstances. But it also could become the narcotic of the self-deluded and the naive.
James Lee Burke
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#63. 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
#64. I went to the bathroom in my pants. That's what you done, man.
James Lee Burke
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. You have two choices in life. You either die or do something with your time. You're going to be doing something - why not write?
James Lee Burke
#68. 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
#69. We all have an extended family, people whom we recognize as our own as soon as we see them.
James Lee Burke
#70. Shakespeare said that all power lies in the world of dreams, and I believe him.
James Lee Burke
#71. Fear is an irrational emotion that floats from object to object like a helium balloon that you touch with your fingertips.
James Lee Burke
#72. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. Every rejection is incremental payment on your dues that in some way will be translated back into your work.
James Lee Burke
#78. In a badass, beer-glass brawl, would you rather have an academic liberal covering your back or a hobnailed redneck?
James Lee Burke
#79. That's one of the great advantages of age. You can say, I don't want to, I don't care, you can throw temper tantrums, and nobody minds.
James Lee Burke
#80. You've got another problem. Like most white trash, you're disrespectful to your betters and proud of your stupidity and ignorance.
James Lee Burke
#81. It's always today, Jim, and it's just going to get better and better, I said.
James Lee Burke
#82. 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
#83. I believe the causes that create them [serial killers] are theological in nature, rather than societal. I believe they make a conscious choice to erase God's thumbprint from their souls.
James Lee Burke
#84. The Gulf Stream waters of Woody Guthrie's famous song were strung with columns of oil that were several miles long.
James Lee Burke
#85. 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
#86. Saint Augustine once admonished that we should never use the truth to injure. I believe there are dark and uncertain moments in our lives when it's not wrong for each of us to feel that he wrote those words especially for us.
James Lee Burke
#87. 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
#88. I read a poem once that had a line in it about a white radiance that stains eternity.
James Lee Burke
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. A lie is an act of theft. It steals peoples faith and makes them resent themselves
James Lee Burke
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. Cruelty and sentimentality are almost always companion characteristics in an individual but never cruelty and love.
James Lee Burke
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. He had been humiliated and treated like the white trash he was. Under the bedsheet that hides the identity of every Ku Klux Klansman is a cretinous, vicious, and childlike human being whose last holdout is his whites-only restroom.
James Lee Burke
#99. It's fair to say that mortality takes many manifestations, but so does the indomitable nature of the human spirit, and it does so in ways that are sometimes hardly noticeable.
James Lee Burke
#100. 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
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