|
7bd589e
|
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 |
|
dff376a
|
god bless the world
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
4cf1cae
|
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 |
|
821de02
|
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 |
|
65c000b
|
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 |
|
bcb81fd
|
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 horseshoe..
|
|
warfare
|
James Lee Burke |
|
fb3a523
|
The Gulf Stream waters of Woody Guthrie's famous song were strung with columns of oil that were several miles long.
|
|
oil-spill
|
James Lee Burke |
|
f88a022
|
Jimmie would forever be the Renaissance humanist, bearing his faith and optimism like a white light inside a chalice.
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
b7d2728
|
Every drunkard has many moments of shame that live like carpet tacks in his memory,
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
5dbaec4
|
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 |
|
4c790e5
|
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.
|
|
virtue
wealth
|
James Lee Burke |
|
2bb74cd
|
Then Belmont discovered the carnival world of Louisiana politics, in the way a mental patient might wander into a theme park for the insane and realize that life held more promise than he had ever dreamed. Burke, James Lee. Purple Cane Road (Dave Robicheaux Book 11)
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
49a40b5
|
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 |
|
d990c4e
|
Death was a rodent that ate its way inch by inch through your entrails, chewed at your liver and stomach, severed tendon from organ, until finally, when you were along in the dark, it sat gorged and sleek next to your head, its eyes resting, its wet muzzle like a kiss, a promise whispered in your ear.
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
fba9d9e
|
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.
|
|
garden-district
ireland
new-orleans
|
James Lee Burke |
|
ba9b2cb
|
How do you handle it when your anger brims over the edge of the pot? You use the shortened version of the Serenity Prayer, which is "Fuck it." Like Voltaire's Candide tending his own garden or the British infantry going up the Khyber Pass one bloody foot at a time, you do your job, and you grin and walk through the cannon smoke, and you just keep saying fuck it. You also have faith in your own convictions and never let the naysayers and tho..
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
a220c69
|
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 |
|
cc768be
|
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 |
|
92d806b
|
There are those who are made different in the womb.
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
fb0e466
|
the only argument you ever win is the one you don't have.
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
27cb27b
|
Maybe you've been there. You go into a police or sheriff's station after a gang of black kids forced you to stop your car while they smashed out your windows with garbage cans; a strung-out addict made you kneel at gunpoint on the floor of a grocery store, and before you knew it the begging words rose uncontrollably in your throat; some bikers pulled you from the back of a bar and sat on your arms while one of them unzippered his blue jeans..
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
5fdce5d
|
I wanted to believe he was mad. Unfortunately, I no longer knew what madness was.
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
1f289bf
|
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 |
|
4074cda
|
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 |
|
80af539
|
At a certain age, you realize the greatest loss you can experience is a theft you perpetrate upon yourself--the waste of days given us. Is there any more piercing remorse than the realization that a person has thrown away the potential that resides in every sunrise?
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
fe615a5
|
soldiers who return from foreign battlefields with a syndrome that survivors of the Great War called the thousand-yard stare.
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
7c2e0d2
|
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 |
|
3f79046
|
of the story showed the four brain-destroyed women Linda Gail had shown me. The grainy transfer of the images to newsprint had made them even more macabre. The story had come off the wire in Los Angeles and was written by a gossip columnist who quoted other gossip columnists as the story's source. The details were bizarre and prurient and unbelievable, in the way of stories from True Detective, Argosy, Saga, and Male, and because they were ..
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
c516589
|
Cancer and lightning go where they want. So does political corruption.
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
c17e124
|
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 |
|
55fd3d5
|
I returned to New Orleans and my problems with pari-mutuel windows and a dark-haired, milk-skinned wife from Martinique who went home with men from the Garden District while I was passed out in a houseboat on Lake Pontchartrain, the downdraft of U.S. Army helicopters flattening a plain of elephant grass in my dreams.
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
b91c356
|
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 ..
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
318d428
|
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 |
|
dc19120
|
Through the screen, he could smell the evening as though it were a living presence, the purple and yellow flowers in his yard and the dark green wetness of the fescue part of a song that was never supposed to die. Except he could feel things ending, coming apart at the center, and he didn't know why.
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
5d3e2c1
|
Sometimes your luck runs out and you have to accept that the life you planned was a dream written on water.
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
a95bf05
|
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 |
|
20eb23d
|
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 |
|
1813ab2
|
But perhaps age has taught me that the earth is still new, molten at the core and still forming, that black leaves in the winter forest will crawl with life in the spring, that our story is ongoing and it is indeed a crime to allow the heart's energies to dissipate with the fading of light on the horizon.
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
c444ec5
|
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 |
|
d511703
|
Albert never told anyone of what the guard did to him. But sometimes he smells the guard's stink in his sleep, a combination of chewing tobacco and hair oil and testosterone and dried sweat that had been ironed with starch into the clothes...Albert has always wanted to believe this emblematic moment in his life was regional in origin, born out of ignorance and fear and redneck cruelty, perhaps one even precipitated by his own recklessness, ..
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
7da4f22
|
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 |
|
bc6e35b
|
Who can make sense of the roles we play? If I could draw any conclusion about the long, depressing slog of human progress, it's the possibility that unseen elements lie just on the other side of the physical universe and that somehow we're actors on the stage of the Globe, right across the Thames from a place called Pissing Alley, whether William Shakespeare or Christopher Marlowe are aware of our presence or not.
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
ce743ef
|
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 |
|
7b09009
|
profligacy
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |