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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| e9b35df | Quentin finishes with the limb and sits up. "Who wears the pants in your family, man?" "That depends on the issue." -- | Greg Iles | ||
| c98c4f2 | Comparing that shyster to a snake would be a slander to the serpent. | Greg Iles | ||
| 00955e1 | Mia's eyes for too long would send me straight down the road Drew has already traveled. The reality of a stunningly beautiful and intelligent young woman explaining why it's all right for you to make love to her is enough to make any male lose all capacity for rational thought. In my mind I hear Wade Anders telling me that the hardest thing he ever did was turn down the girls who've come on to him in his office. Those girls, I am certain, w.. | Greg Iles | ||
| 8e78166 | But what refuses to leave my mind is the image of Drew and Kate making love before the camera. Mia viewed that photograph with me and felt no embarrassment at all. On the contrary, she wants to experience the same intensity she saw there with me. More than that, she's telling me beforehand that I'll have no obligation to her. Evolutionary nirvana, Caitlin called it. God, was she right. | Greg Iles | ||
| d0370ad | Will on the phone, the sooner you stop bleeding." Hickey dialed a number and" | Greg Iles | ||
| e5e1171 | hair. He's bald now. But he still looks like he could ride a bull ragged." I jump at the sound of the garage door. Mom gives me a little wave, then crosses the kitchen as silently as if she were floating on a magic carpet and disappears down the hall. Moments later, my father walks through the kitchen door, his face drawn and tired. "I figured you'd be waiting for me." "Dad, we've got to talk." Dread seems to seep from the pores in his face.. | Greg Iles | ||
| d2fe460 | The naivete of human beings is truly breathtaking | Greg Iles | ||
| 9312e8b | chopper's | Greg Iles | ||
| b65aa19 | God is merely a part of the human brain, an evolutionary coping mechanism that developed to make bearable our awareness of our own deaths. When | Greg Iles | ||
| 92e6009 | But now that I've seen the reality up close, I understand white frustration. Black people here are just different. Not all of them, but so many. I don't know why. Maybe it's because this was one of the biggest slaveholding cotton counties along the river. I don't know. I used to think it was ignorance, but I'm starting to see it as willful ignorance, and maybe worse. | Greg Iles | ||
| ba6aa1a | Their belligerence in public places, their rudeness...there's almost a pride in ignorance here. Black employees refuse to wait on white customers in stores. They treat incompetence as though it's some kind of act of civil disobedience. I'm sick of it, Penn. | Greg Iles | ||
| a4370b1 | And the black politicians...my God. I've watched black aldermen do patently illegal things and then brag about it. They don't care whether something is legal or not." "White politicians abused the system for years, Caitlin. They just did it in a more subtle way." "I know that. But is that an excuse for blacks to repeat the abuses of the old system? The system Martin Luther King and Malcolm X died to dismantle?" | Greg Iles | ||
| f503fa0 | fuchsia-blooming crape myrtle trees, which are tended | Greg Iles | ||
| 63bda4b | The system is broken! And one of the reasons it's broken down here is that it's largely run by and for black people. They simply do not place a high cultural value on education, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise any longer." I can't believe it. Like so many Yankee transplants, Caitlin has had a dramatic change of heart on the issue of race. But though I've seen it before, I would never have expected it from her. "That's a pretty racist.. | Greg Iles | ||
| 5d43c5e | down to brass tacks. What have you | Greg Iles | ||
| ca06611 | Caitlin is right, although her argument would probably offend every woman on the jury. | Greg Iles | ||
| 00e4778 | some of what she said actually offended me. Caitlin truly was a liberal when she arrived in Natchez, and she routinely chastised me for being too conservative. But now it seems that her liberal "convictions" weren't convictions at all, but rather easy opinions based on the lectures of Ivy League professors. After a few years in the South, she's ready to give up on racial harmony and flee to more "enlightened"--read homogenous--environs." | Greg Iles | ||
| 4843ccf | As I ponder Sonny's life and death, it strikes me that, whatever his prejudices, he was one of the quiet heroes of this country. | Greg Iles | ||
| daaad33 | wait | Greg Iles | ||
| c923f99 | I'm not sure Shad's worried about that. You said it yourself, his concern is the special election. That means making good on his promise to make the system equal, i.e., to nail a rich white man. That's what will get Shad a unified black vote. I expect Judge Minor to move as fast as legally possible. | Greg Iles | ||
| 8456103 | I've sometimes wondered whether human beings are like the universe itself, where 95 percent of what surrounds us is dark matter, and cannot be seen. The only way black holes can be detected is by the behavior of what's around them--light and matter being distorted by immense forces within the collapsing star. Have I seen and yet not seen certain events that hint at deep, | Greg Iles | ||
| 55c6c6c | Of course you have. I'm a man, and I respond to all that you are. But I also feel things that a father feels for a daughter. Mainly, I feel very protective of you. And my first duty is to protect you from me. | Greg Iles | ||
| cd76617 | When drug dealers get killed--black or white--the public perception is that the victims simply got what was coming to them. When a young girl is raped and murdered--black or white--our knowledge of the primitive laws of attraction and male sexual dominance informs our response. But when middle-aged white people minding their own business are murdered in their home in the safest part of town, the fundamental order of Southern life is thrown .. | Greg Iles | ||
| 7b48521 | some harsher truths: that the world they will find beyond the borders of Mississippi looks very different from the one that nurtured them to this point; that the whites among them might soon find themselves the targets of prejudice for a change; | Greg Iles | ||
| 377260c | Where are you going?" Quentin asks. "To do my job. You need to start thinking about whether you've got what it takes to do yours." "Hey, don't--" I slam the door and hurry down the hall. The Brightside Manor Apartments stand like a visual reprimand to every liberal fantasy of government-subsidized housing. The dilapidated buildings look like sets built for a Blaxploitation flick from the seventies, like you could walk up and push them down .. | Greg Iles | ||
| 85f1f40 | Some stories must wait to be told. Any writer worth his salt knows this. Sometimes you wait for events to percolate in your subconscious until a deeper truth emerges; other times you're simply waiting for the principals to die. Sometimes it's both. This story is like that. | Greg Iles | ||
| 9dac431 | At least fifty people are sitting or standing within sight of me. The oldest ones sit on their stoops beneath dented metal awnings. The middle-aged stand in little knots, the men sharing bottles wrapped in paper sacks, the women holding babies. I don't see any teenagers--it's as though they've been drafted for some special war--but several toddlers walk unsupervised through the parking lot. Three of them are naked. | Greg Iles | ||
| 119ca3a | to yearn for ignorance is to embrace the wishful thinking of a child. For once the stone hits the surface of the pond, the ripples never really stop. | Greg Iles | ||
| 09a7088 | Now it turns out he was having sex with his babysitter, and they're so pissed off they're about to pop. But their anger's not really about Kate, you know? It's about them. They feel betrayed. They put him up on a pedestal, and then he committed the crime of being human. So fuck him, right? Never mind that Kate was two weeks shy of eighteen, and on the make for exactly the kind of affair she had with Drew. | Greg Iles | ||
| e0a0a81 | At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst. --Aristotle | Greg Iles | ||
| 46ab940 | Every son eventually learns his daddy has feet of clay. You just happen to have a father of singular rectitude, so it took until you were forty-five. That doesn't make it any less painful. | Greg Iles | ||
| 4e87afd | Fools rush in where angels fear to tread. | Greg Iles | ||
| 473ea08 | You said you had enough evidence to convict Jonathan Sands of money laundering on your own." "That's correct." "I'd like to see that evidence." "I'd like a chocolate chip cookie without the chips." "Mr. Cage--" | Greg Iles | ||
| 7445ecd | he know how to work the computers, navigate our intranet? Would he know the user names or passwords of the reporters?" "No. But if Nick didn't delete the files, then it could be anybody. How the hell do we" | Greg Iles | ||
| 63c1e26 | You want the party line or the real answer?" "You know what I want." His eyes shine as he shakes his head. "Penn, these girls...they're not the girls we went to school with, okay? There's a group of girls here who have a club called the Bald Eagles. Know why?" "Do I want to know?" "They all shave their pussies." "Is that a big deal?" Wade raises his eyebrows. "They're in the eighth grade." "Jesus." Even in our frankest discussions, Mia and .. | Greg Iles | ||
| d74789e | I'm a big believer in first lines. If a writer doesn't grab you with their first sentence, even in a literary novel, they might need to think about another line of work. | Greg Iles | ||
| a23cfc4 | he committed such a heinous act, would have owned up to it and taken his punishment like a man, as the archaic phrase goes. That may be a quaint and sexist notion these days, but some of what is best about the South is archaic. The tragedy is that it should be so. | Greg Iles | ||
| 55a0156 | About twenty minutes ago, during a commercial break, Melba had thought she'd heard a helicopter in the distance. Tom had been unable to hear it, but that was no surprise, given his progressive hearing loss, and she'd heard nothing since. He told her it was probably nothing to worry about. Statistically, Mississippi had some of the worst drivers in the nation, so LifeFlight helicopters were common at all hours, even over rural counties. | Greg Iles | ||
| 4d26b5e | have resolved a simple thing: I will do those things which make me happy today, and which I can also live with ten years from now. | Greg Iles | ||
| f1bc417 | When everything is at risk, good judgment, not haste, makes the difference between life and death. Panic is the enemy.... | Greg Iles | ||
| 5e8cb24 | Men of integrity and courage are rare these days. | Greg Iles | ||
| b1ba7df | came across a letter by T. S. Eliot, who I had always vaguely assumed was English. To my surprise, I discovered that Eliot had grown up along the same river I had, in St. Louis, and to a friend he wrote this about the Mississippi: I feel that there is something in having passed one's childhood beside the big river, which is incommunicable to those who have not. I consider myself fortunate to have been born here, rather than in Boston, or Ne.. | Greg Iles | ||
| a3ad420 | We rarely act from logic when facing the critical choices of our lives. | Greg Iles | ||
| 2d59d23 | Posts oriented into a Woodhenge, a huge circle for astronomical observations." "Like Stonehenge?" "Exactly like that. Or Cahokia, a similar site up in Illinois." | Greg Iles |