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7bd589e
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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.
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James Lee Burke |
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dff376a
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god bless the world
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James Lee Burke |
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4cf1cae
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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.
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James Lee Burke |
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821de02
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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.
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James Lee Burke |
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65c000b
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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.
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James Lee Burke |
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bcb81fd
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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..
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warfare
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James Lee Burke |
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fb3a523
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The Gulf Stream waters of Woody Guthrie's famous song were strung with columns of oil that were several miles long.
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oil-spill
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James Lee Burke |
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f88a022
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Jimmie would forever be the Renaissance humanist, bearing his faith and optimism like a white light inside a chalice.
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James Lee Burke |
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b7d2728
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Every drunkard has many moments of shame that live like carpet tacks in his memory,
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James Lee Burke |
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5dbaec4
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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.
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James Lee Burke |
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4c790e5
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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.
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virtue
wealth
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James Lee Burke |
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2bb74cd
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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)
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James Lee Burke |
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49a40b5
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If we break promises to God, shouldn't we be allowed an occasional violation of our word to our friends and superiors?
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James Lee Burke |
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d990c4e
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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.
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James Lee Burke |
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fba9d9e
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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.
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garden-district
ireland
new-orleans
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James Lee Burke |
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bc6e35b
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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.
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James Lee Burke |
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ce743ef
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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.
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James Lee Burke |
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7b09009
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profligacy
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James Lee Burke |
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ced04af
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People are what they do, not what they say, not what they think, not what they pretend to be.
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James Lee Burke |
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44bf514
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There are not many places left in the United States where people can get off the computer, stop filing tax returns, and in effect become invisible. The rain forests in the Cascades and parts of West Montana come to mind, and perhaps the 'Glades still offer hope to those who wish to resign from modern times. The other place is the Atchafalaya Basin.
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James Lee Burke |
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ec64d5e
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A category 5 hurricane carries an explosive force several times greater than that of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.
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James Lee Burke |
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5acf12f
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The human spirit is frail. People believe whatever they need to believe. I feel sorry for all of them.
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James Lee Burke |
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dacdeab
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Cruelty and sentimentality are almost always companion characteristics in an individual but never cruelty and love.
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James Lee Burke |
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d4b8eb4
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When you love somebody, you give up making decisions just for yourself.
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James Lee Burke |
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42a3249
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documented in a security file was of no concern to him. The fact that a man like Joe Tex could have access to it
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James Lee Burke |
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f85cb92
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I had learned long ago that resolution by itself is not enough; we are what we do, not what we think and feel.
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James Lee Burke |
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2131df8
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As a southerner I had been brought up to believe that through conditioning and experience you could accept with some measure of tranquility any of the flaws in the human situation. But death is one flaw that always lands like a fist in the center of the forehead. No matter how many times you see it, or smell its gray rotting odor, or come close to buying it yourself, each time is always like the first. No amount of earlier experience prepar..
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James Lee Burke |
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6bb1814
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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.
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James Lee Burke |
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87a63e2
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You pull on dat 'gator's tail, he gonna clean your kneecaps, him.
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James Lee Burke |
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71f97b9
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As with all megalomaniacs, he had no handles. He was the type of man the Spanish call sin dios, sin verguenza, without God or shame.
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James Lee Burke |
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802a02b
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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.
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conspiracy-theories
murder
socrates
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James Lee Burke |
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6640d13
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Then I saw the consuming nature of her fear, her willingness to believe that exploitative charlatans could change her fate or really cared what happened to her, the dread and angst that congealed like a cold vapor around her heart when she awoke each morning, one day closer to the injection table at Angola.
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James Lee Burke |
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26981a4
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Thinking at night isn't good for anybody.
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James Lee Burke |
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ba9b2cb
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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..
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James Lee Burke |
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a220c69
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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.
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James Lee Burke |
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cc768be
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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.
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James Lee Burke |
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92d806b
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There are those who are made different in the womb.
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James Lee Burke |
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fb0e466
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the only argument you ever win is the one you don't have.
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James Lee Burke |
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27cb27b
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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..
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James Lee Burke |
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5fdce5d
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I wanted to believe he was mad. Unfortunately, I no longer knew what madness was.
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James Lee Burke |
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1f289bf
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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.
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James Lee Burke |
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4074cda
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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.
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James Lee Burke |
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80af539
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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?
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James Lee Burke |
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fe615a5
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soldiers who return from foreign battlefields with a syndrome that survivors of the Great War called the thousand-yard stare.
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James Lee Burke |