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964681c
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A glacier consumes whole forests by inches.
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Greg Iles |
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e0952c5
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He did say something about my butt once." "What?" "No way." "Come on." "God." She bowed her head as though mortified. "He said I had a ghetto bootie." I grabbed the wheel to keep us on the road. "Meaning?" "You know...a butt like a black chick." I laughed at Mia's expression of mixed embarrassment and amusement. "Do you have one?" "You tell me." "Yeah, you kind of do." She burst out laughing. "It is a good one, though, I'll admit that." "It..
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Greg Iles |
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d3264cb
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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.
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Greg Iles |
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f98a482
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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 ..
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Greg Iles |
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5af314c
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There's nothing harder than fighting alone, with no one to keep you company in your foxhole.
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Greg Iles |
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097994e
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searching, revealing nothing. A few heads in the audience turn to me, wondering who could possibly have upset the equilibrium of the
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Greg Iles |
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f2feb29
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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 ch..
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Greg Iles |
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dde9a6f
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The stillest thing in the world is the corpse of someone you loved. A hunk of cold granite seems more alive than a dead human being. You don't expect a stone to move. A person robbed of all motion and cold to the touch is the most alien object in the world. Natural instinct drives us away from the decaying body, and quickly. Yet love compels us forward, to kiss the empty vessel of the soul departed. ...Lesson two: there are many fates worse..
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Greg Iles |
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506a31a
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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.
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Greg Iles |
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1ace358
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Kaiser and Lenz are staring at each other like hunters who have walked into a thicket after a lion and found a unicorn.
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Greg Iles |
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9d1dfe2
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Frost's "The Death of the Hired Man" ran through his overheated brain: Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in."
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Greg Iles |
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1e5446f
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The hour of justice does not strike on the dials of this world.
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Greg Iles |
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7f13093
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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, A..
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Greg Iles |
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c4c6c95
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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.
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Greg Iles |
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2d101f4
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When you write a book, you have total control of the universe and everyone in it.
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Greg Iles |
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84f3481
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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?"
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Greg Iles |
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a72e68f
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IF A MAN is forced to choose between the truth and his father, only a fool chooses the truth.
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Greg Iles |
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8307bdd
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Nothing was what you thought it was, because no one was who they pretended to be.
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Greg Iles |
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6990c5b
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For once the stone hits the surface of the pond, the ripples never really stop. The waves diminish, and all seems to return to its previous state, but that's an illusion. Disturbed fish change their patterns, a snake slides off the muddy bank into the water, a deer bolts into the open to be shot. And the stone remains on the slimy bottom, out of sight but inarguably there, dense and permanent, sediment settling over it, turtles and catfish ..
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Greg Iles |
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76a5076
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between us. That night I prayed like a man trying to polish coal
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Greg Iles |
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3d9ea0d
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a military base, to check out the story.
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Greg Iles |
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8d988ef
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There have been times I would have given anything for such faith, for the belief that divine justice exists somewhere in the universe. Facing Sarah's death without it was an existential baptism of fire. The comfort that belief in an afterlife can provide was obvious in the hospital waiting rooms and chemo wards, where
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Greg Iles |
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4a558e6
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Faith is something you have or you don't, and to pretend you do in the hope of gaining some last-minute dispensation from a being whose existence you have denied all your life goes against everything I am. I have never placed myself above God. I simply cannot find within myself the capacity for belief.
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Greg Iles |
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955b54c
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And a man who does nothing during a crisis is as bad as a man who causes one.
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Greg Iles |
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8b0b4d4
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Lenz snorts. "My mistake."
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Greg Iles |
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c707aa1
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Remember what Aristotle said!" she cries. "Undeservedly you will atone for the sins of your fathers. And Horace!" Horace? "What did Horace say, Pithy?" "Mothers are fonder than fathers of their children, because they're more certain they are their own." --
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Greg Iles |
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1b9486f
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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.
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Greg Iles |
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f824098
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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.
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Greg Iles |
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a4bfd9d
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People say time be like a river. That's bullshit. You can swim upstream and downstream in a river. Can you do that with time? Hell, no. Time ain't no river. Time is a big fucking razor blade scraping across the universe. And the edge of that razor is now. See? That's all there is, man. No upstream or down, no past or future--just now. And all the stuff we feel, like hoping and feeling sorry for shit, that's nothing. Useless. Nothing matters..
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Greg Iles |
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ab90c12
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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 o..
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Greg Iles |
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4a8311e
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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.
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Greg Iles |
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7e33856
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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.
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Greg Iles |
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e4df083
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While Sands's eyes flicker with private mirth, the evil that Tim hinted at fills my soul like a squid's ink.
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Greg Iles |
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7cfea36
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Nothing frightens me more than the faith in my daughter's eyes. How many men deserve that kind of trust? One by one, the mentors I've most admired eventually revealed chinks in their armor, cracks in their facades, and tired feet of clay--or worse.
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Greg Iles |
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fa91973
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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.
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sex
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Greg Iles |
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88f28dd
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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,"
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Greg Iles |
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9c7aa4f
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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
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Greg Iles |
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abeae24
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For Sweden, the price of aiding the Allies could be fifty thousand uninvited guests
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Greg Iles |
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d3479d7
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As Peggy snored beside him, Tom pondered the Greek and Hebrew legends of the scapegoat. Pharmakos to the Greeks, Azazel to the Hebrews. A shameful human practice, he'd always thought, one born from guilt and superstition. But most human behavior had grown out of necessity, and he now understood the empirical value of the rituals for which he had felt only contempt before.
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Greg Iles |
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9985a9c
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her? I wonder. "Tom?" I say, taking advantage of"
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Greg Iles |
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d591c05
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path of least resistance, or the walk over hot coals.
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Greg Iles |
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dfe3ebd
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There it was, the choice I'd confronted so often in life: the path of least resistance, or the walk over hot coals.
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Greg Iles |
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0b8f142
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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.
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Greg Iles |
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a70c414
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CNN, okay? They came at night and beat down the doors. All
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Greg Iles |