|
6972785
|
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 |
|
5363d93
|
Administrators don't believe in conspiracies. If they did, they'd have to resign their jobs. That
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
a707115
|
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.
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
e62d88a
|
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."
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
1bf2e4d
|
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.
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
9697a59
|
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 |
|
d28eddb
|
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 |
|
db300f8
|
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 |
|
2c38ea6
|
I'm tired of sackcloth and
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
0a6d212
|
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 |
|
dae2541
|
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.
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
899f776
|
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."
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
71f203c
|
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 ..
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
743b1f0
|
inextricable
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
33b23d8
|
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.
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
c11d87b
|
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.
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
d6f21b3
|
Maggie's face darkened, as
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
07cca22
|
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
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
f62609b
|
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.
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
19c03ca
|
You make me resent myself, Troyce. That's the worst thing somebody can do to somebody else." He looked at"
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
b7d674c
|
Emmeline seemed to lie the way all narcissists do. Whatever they say, regardless of its absurdity, becomes the truth.
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
8b35c94
|
believe long ago had decided it was better to be first in Gaul rather than second in Rome.
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
44a3d58
|
Nobody ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
9e7bd95
|
But if Cholo Ramirez was indeed intended to embark on the Ghost Trail of his Indian ancestors, its entrance was not marked by cottonwood trees along a riverbank on a windswept green plain. The Ghost Trail for Cholo lay inside the incessant scream of a shorted-out car horn and the heated smell of car metal and exhaust fumes and asphalt only a block from the Alamo. That's where the paramedics pried his hands off the steering wheel of his '49 ..
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
9883181
|
his motor control still functioned but his soul went somewhere else.
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
5cde3d7
|
just another gargoyle that took up temporary residence in Danny Boy's dreams and went away. "Some people say insomnia is a disorder."
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
790ab42
|
At some point in your life, you have to give up anger or it will destroy your spirit the way cancer destroys living tissue.
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
a2b6bf2
|
Mexico was not a country, Krill thought. It was a revolution that had never stopped.
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
6a37b36
|
past Louis Armstrong Park, a place no white person in his right mind enters either day or night,
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
781c87a
|
Advice might be cheap, but there is nothing facile about the faith of those to whom we give it.
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
c57d385
|
Pray that liars aren't kept a long time in purgatory
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
9cd34c6
|
I would like to believe that there is a resolution in the human tragedy and that order can be reimposed upon the earth in the same way it occurs in the fifth act of the Elizabethan drama that supposedly mirrors our lives. My experience has been otherwise. History seldom corrects itself in its own sequence, and when we mete out justice, we often do it in a fashion that perpetuates the evil of the transgressors and breathes new life into the ..
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
35c7214
|
Barbara Shanahan, sometimes known as Battering Ram Shanahan. She was over six feet tall and had freckles and wore her light red hair cut short and wore a blue suit with white hose. She worked hard and was a good prosecutor, and I had always wanted to like her. But she seldom smiled and she went about her job with the abrasiveness of a carpenter building coffins with a nail gun.
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
c31abc4
|
The rain spun in the yellow arc lights over the cafe parking lot. It was empty inside, except for a fat Negro woman whom I could see through the service window in the kitchen, and a pretty, redheaded waitress in her early twenties, dressed in a pink uniform with her hair tied up on her freckled neck. She was obviously tired, but she was polite and smiled at me when she took my order, and I felt a sense of guilt, almost shame, at my suscepti..
|
|
lonliness
attraction
|
James Lee Burke |
|
65ac0f2
|
I don't like to bust drunk drivers. I don't like to listen to their explanations, watch their pitiful attempts to affect sobriety, or see the sheen of fear break out in their eyes when they realize they're headed for the drunk tank with little to look forward to in the morning except the appearance of their names in the newspaper. Or maybe in truth I just don't like to see myself when I look into their faces.
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
e1acb84
|
I drove to the bar Theodosha had called from and parked on the street. The bar was a gray, dismal place, ensconced like a broken matchbox under a dying oak tree, its only indication of gaiety a neon beer sign that flickered in one window. She was at a table in back, the glow of the jukebox lighting her face and the deep blackness of her hair. She tipped a collins glass to her mouth, her eyes locked on mine. "Let me take you home," I said. "..
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
0e1f37a
|
I love you, bwana, but sometimes I think I committed an unpardonable sin in a former life, and you were put here to give me a second chance.
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
463e080
|
He had learned in Vietnam there were three groups of people who got you killed--pencil pushers, amateurs, and idealists.
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
1f1cf41
|
Solitude and peace with oneself are probably the only preparation one has for death.
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
38eedf3
|
Gamblers and lovers pay big dues and enjoy limited consolations. But sometimes they are enough.
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
64b2365
|
Baptized Christians ran the ovens in the camps.
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
40a372b
|
At heart they were secular Calvinists and believed their fellow man was born in a degraded state; consequently, they oversaw atrocities with equanimity and substituted pragmatism for compassion and slept the sleep of the dead.
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
37088d9
|
He knows things don't happen in order, like past, present, and future.
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |
|
c64d9c3
|
They seemed to have the coloration and texture of the rubber in a pencil eraser. They
|
|
|
James Lee Burke |