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Night Comes to the Cumberland.
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James Lee Burke |
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beautiful street in the Western world.
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James Lee Burke |
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Straight shooters always win
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James Lee Burke |
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busthead
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James Lee Burke |
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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.
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James Lee Burke |
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Be your own man, even if you don't add up to much.
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James Lee Burke |
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meretricious
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James Lee Burke |
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I've killed men against whom I had no grievance.
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James Lee Burke |
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If people stick together, they can always make do.
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James Lee Burke |
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Shakespeare said that all power lies in the world of dreams, and I believe him.
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James Lee Burke |
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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?
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James Lee Burke |
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It's always today, Jim, and it's just going to get better and better," I said."
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James Lee Burke |
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This piece of land was our original sin, except we had found no baptismal rite to expunge it from our lives. That green-purple field of new cane was rooted in rib cage and eye socket. But what of the others whose lives had begun here and ended in other places? The ones who became prostitutes in cribs on Hopkins Street in New Iberia and Jane's Alley in New Orleans, sliced their hands open with oyster knives, laid bare their shin bones with t..
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James Lee Burke |
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Then millions of lights came on in the canyons, along the freeways, and through the vast sweep of the Los Angeles basin, and it was almost as if you were looking down upon the end point of the American dream, a geographical poem into which all our highways eventually led, a city of illusion founded by conquistadors and missionaries and consigned to the care of angels, where far below the spinning propellers of our seaplane black kids along ..
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James Lee Burke |
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9d4f5b8
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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.
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James Lee Burke |
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THE SUN HAD just crested on the horizon like a misplaced planet, swollen and molten and red, lighting a landscape that seemed sculpted out of clay and soft stone and marked by the fossilized tracks of animals with no names, when a tall barefoot man wearing little more than rags dropped his horse's reins and eased himself off the horse's back and worked his way down an embankment into a riverbed chained with pools of water that glimmered as ..
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James Lee Burke |
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The gift of Morpheus brought not only sleep but oblivion.
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James Lee Burke |
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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. I can't be sure. I brood upon it and sleep little. I wait like a denied lover for the blue glow of dawn.
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James Lee Burke |
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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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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
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James Lee Burke |
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The false dawn, with its illusions and mist-wrapped softness, can be as inadequate and fleeting as Morpheus' gifts.
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James Lee Burke |
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fear is an irrational emotion that floats from object to object like a helium balloon that you touch with your fingertips.
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James Lee Burke |
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I hit him so hard spittle and blood flew from his mouth onto a woman's blouse four feet away. I drove my fist into his kidney, a blow that made his back arch as though his spine had been broken, then I hooked him with a left below the eye and drove a right cross into his jaw that knocked him across a folding table.
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James Lee Burke |
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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.
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James Lee Burke |
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Administrators don't believe in conspiracies. If they did, they'd have to resign their jobs. That
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James Lee Burke |
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He has finally learned that lying to oneself is an offense for which human beings seldom grant themselves absolution. He comes to believe that acceptance of a wintry place in the soul and a refusal to speak about it to others is as much consolation as a man gets, and for some odd reason that thought seems to bring him peace.
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James Lee Burke |
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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."
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James Lee Burke |
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She wondered if this were what hell was about. Not a place of punishment but of disparity. Those who had done nothing to earn their fate lived like this, while three miles away, others rode the Ferris wheel and children raised their hands joyfully to a hot-air balloon that rained down candy on their heads.
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James Lee Burke |
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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.
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James Lee Burke |
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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."
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James Lee Burke |
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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.
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James Lee Burke |
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I'm tired of sackcloth and
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James Lee Burke |
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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.
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James Lee Burke |
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I also figuredd out that what we call our destiny is usually determined by two or three casual decision which on the surface seem about as important as spitting your gum through a sewer grate.
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James Lee Burke |
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899f776
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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."
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James Lee Burke |
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Forget morality tales and all the fury and mire of human complexity, and follow the money. It will lead you through urban legends about sex and revenge and jealousy and the acquisition of power over others, but ultimately, it will lead you to the issue from which all the other motivations derive--money, piles of it, green and lovely and cascading like leaves out of a beneficent sky, money and money and money, the one item that human beings ..
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James Lee Burke |
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inextricable
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James Lee Burke |
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Then an event happened that caused him to wonder at the great folly that seemed to govern his life, namely, his attempts to plan and control his future. Most of the events that changed his life had taken place without his consent and at the time had seemed of little consequence. Our destiny didn't lie in the stars, he told himself, or even in our mettle. It lay in our ability to recognize a gift when it was placed in your hands.
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James Lee Burke |
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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.
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James Lee Burke |
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Maggie's face darkened, as
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James Lee Burke |
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If you have attended the dying, you know what their last moments are like. They anticipate the separation of themselves from the world of the living before you do, and they accept it with dignity and without complaint
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James Lee Burke |
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politicians were liars who served the interests of corporations, that populists were con artists, and that the poor were kept poor and uneducated as long as possible.
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James Lee Burke |
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You make me resent myself, Troyce. That's the worst thing somebody can do to somebody else." He looked at"
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James Lee Burke |
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Emmeline seemed to lie the way all narcissists do. Whatever they say, regardless of its absurdity, becomes the truth.
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James Lee Burke |