Top 100 James Lee Burke Quotes
#2. Colored or not, we all work for the white man's cotton ...
James Lee Burke
#3. Administrators don't believe in conspiracies. If they did, they'd have to resign their jobs. That
James Lee Burke
#4. Don't let anyone tell you that age purchases your freedom from fear of death.
James Lee Burke
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. Never read bad stuff if you're an artist; it will impair your own game.
James Lee Burke
#12. But the rain gods went away. They ain't coming back, either." "How do you know that?" "They got no reason to. We don't believe in them no more.
James Lee Burke
#13. 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
#14. Why do I always feel like you're trying to staple my umbilical cord to the corner of your desk?
James Lee Burke
#16. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. It was the poem that explained the nature of courage and turned the mystery of death into a heroic couplet. Ultimately, it was the poem that banished fear from the heart and transformed us from actors into participants.
James Lee Burke
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. I went to the bathroom in my pants. That's what you done, man.
James Lee Burke
#28. The wrong people always worry. The people who are the real problem never worry about anything.
James Lee Burke
#29. 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
#31. 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
#32. We are the sum total of what we have done and where we have been, and I sincerely believe that in many ways the world in which I grew up was better than the one in which we live today.
James Lee Burke
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#39. The key to why things change is the key to everything.
James E. Burke
#41. 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
#42. The only thing an artist has to remember is to never lose faith in his vision.
James Lee Burke
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. Why should we look to the past in order to prepare for the future? Because there is nowhere else to look.
James Burke
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. Every drunkard has many moments of shame that live like carpet tacks in his memory,
James Lee Burke
#52. We all end up in the same place. Some sonner than others.
James Lee Burke
#54. Humility is not a virtue in a writer, it is an absolute necessity.
James Lee Burke
#56. Big as a horse turd floating in a milk shake.
Wyatt Dixson
James Lee Burke
#57. 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
#58. There is no higher form of artistic expression then film
James Lee Burke
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. Don't undo a brave and noble deed. Don't rob yourself of your own virtue.
James Lee Burke
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. Somehow sleep allows us to see clearly those very things that are obscured by the light of day.
James Lee Burke
#67. 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
#69. Jimmie would forever be the Renaissance humanist, bearing his faith and optimism like a white light inside a chalice.
James Lee Burke
#70. To misuse one's talent, to be cavalier about it, to set it aside because of fear or sloth is unpardonable.
James Lee Burke
#71. How do you explain to yourself the casual manner in which you threw your life away?
James Lee Burke
#72. The best moments in life are not the kind many historians record.
James Lee Burke
#73. When you read a book, you hold another's mind in your hands.
James Burke
#74. 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
#75. Every third night a commitee holds a meeting in my head.
James Lee Burke
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. Using a first-person narrator is simply a matter of hearing the voice inside yourself.
James Lee Burke
#81. 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
#82. No, I'm a coonass, my religion is shaky, and I've never hit the juice.
James Lee Burke
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. No matter what the other side does to you, you grin and walk through the cannon smoke. It drives them crazy.
James Lee Burke
#87. There's nothing like rejection to make you do an inventory of yourself.
James Lee Burke
#88. Soldiers who return from foreign battlefields with a syndrome that survivors of the Great War called the thousand-yard stare.
James Lee Burke
#89. Did you ever see a mob rush across town to do a good deed? Dave Robicheaux
James Lee Burke
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. At age nineteen I did not want to accept the possibility that a man's murder could be treated with the social significance of a hangnail that had been snipped off someone's finger.
James Lee Burke
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. Jesse James's next tattoo should be a warning label: Danger. Loving this man could break you.
Alafair Burke
#100. 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
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