Quotessence
Home / Authors / James Lee Burke Books
James Lee Burke

James Lee Burke Books

Author

Robicheaux

A source page for quotes linked to James Lee Burke.

0 quotes

Heartwood

A source page for quotes linked to James Lee Burke.

0 quotes

Sunset Limited

A source page for quotes linked to James Lee Burke.

0 quotes

Swan Peak

A source page for quotes linked to James Lee Burke.

0 quotes

Related Quotes

“If you have dealt with liars, even pathological ones who pass polygraph tests, you know the signs to look for. The liar blinks just before the end of the lie, or he keeps his eyelids stitched to his brow. He folds his arms on his chest, subconsciously concealing his deception. The voice becomes warm, a bit saccharine; sometimes there's an ethereal glow in the face. He repeats his statements unnecessarily and peppers his speech with adverbs and hyperbole. The first-person pronouns 'I,' 'me,' 'mine,' and 'myself' dominate his rhetoric. Conversely, the truth teller is laconic and seems bored with the discussion, not caring whether you get it right or not.”

TruthLiesLiarsInterviewPolice Procedural
Book:Robicheaux
Create image

“But no one could say he hadn't gotten even. He could not count the field women whom he had sexually degraded and demoralized and in whom he had left his seed so their bastard children would be a daily visual reminder of what a plantation white man could do to a plantation black woman whenever he wanted, nor could he count the black men whom he had made fear his blackjack as they would fear Satan himself, making each of them a lifetime enemy of all white people.”

FearCrimeRacismHatredOppressionSatanSouthernRapeDegradePlantationsBlackjack
Book:Jolie Blon's Bounce
Create image

“This was not an ordinary AA group. The failed, the aberrant, the doubly addicted, and the totally brain-fried whose neurosis didn't even have a name found their way to the Work the Steps or Die, Motherfucker meeting: strippers from the Quarter, psychotic street people, twenty-dollar hookers, peckerwood fundamentalists, leather-clad, born-again bikers, women who breast-fed their infants in a sea of cigarette smoke, a couple of cops who had done federal time, male prostitutes dying of AIDS, parolees with a lean, hungry look who sought only a signature on an attendance slip for their P.O.'s, methheads who drank from fire extinguishers in the joint, and Vietnam vets who wore their military tattoos and black- or olive-colored 1st Cav. and airborne T-shirts and still heard the thropping of helicopter blades in their sleep.”

Human Nature
Book:Jolie Blon's Bounce
Create image

“The rain spun in the yellow arc lights over the café 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 susceptibility and easy fondness for a young woman's smile. Because if you're forty-nine and unmarried or a widower or if you've simply chosen to live alone, you're easily flattered by a young woman's seeming attention to you, and you forget that it is often simply a deference to your age.”

AgeAttractionLonliness
Book:Black Cherry Blues
Create image

“I used to know a carnival man turned preacher who said the key to his success was understanding the people of what he called Snake's Navel, Arkansas. He said in Snake's Navel, the biggest thing going on Saturday night was the Dairy Queen. He said you could get the people there to do damn near anything --pollute their own water, work at five-dollar-an-hour jobs, drive fifty miles to a health clinic-- as long as you packaged it right. That meant you gave them a light show and faith healings and blow-down-the-walls gospel music with a whole row of American flags across the stage. He said what they liked best, though --what really got them to pissing all over themselves-- was to be told it was other people going to hell and not them. He said people in Snake's Navel wasn't real fond of homosexuals and Arabs and Hollywood Jews, although he didn't use them kinds of terms in his sermons.”

Red State Mentality
Book:Swan Peak
Create image

“Don't ever quit. Never quit. Never show anybody you're hurt. Grin and walk through the cannon smoke. It will drive them up the wall. You always stay true to your own principles. You always believe in your gift. God doesn't make mistakes when he presents someone with a gift like that. It's there for a reason. Tell the naysayers, those who reject you, to drop dead! Who cares?”

WritingBelieveReasonShowsCareHurtWalksMistakePrinciplesWallQuittingSmokeMaking MistakesRejectsBelieve In YouWho CaresNever QuitAlways BelieveStay TrueCannonsNaysayersRejects You
Author:James Lee Burke
Create image

“..why is it that in problematic situations almost everyone resorts to axioms and societal remedies that in actuality almost nobody believes in?...ask yourself, have you ever known anyone whose marriage was saved by a marriage counselor, whose drinking was cured by a psychiatrist, whose son was kept out of reform school by a social worker?”

BelieveSchoolAsksSocialSituationKnownSonDrinkingWorkersSavedReformRemedyResortsPsychiatristAxiomsSocial WorkerActualityCounselor
Author:James Lee Burke
Create image

“How do you caution a fawn about a cigarette a motorist has just flipped from his car window into a patch of yellow grass, or tell a sparrow that winged creatures eventually plummet to earth?”

EarthCarCreaturesWindowGrassYellowCigaretteCautionPatchesSparrowsFlippedFawns
Book:A Billy Bob and Hackberry Holland Ebook Boxed Set: In the Moon of Red Ponies, Rain Gods, Excerpt from Feast Day of Fools
Create image

“I believe every...man remembers the girl he thinks he should have married. She reappears to him in his lonely moments, or he sees her in the face of a young girl in the park, buying a snowball under an oak tree by the baseball diamond. But she belongs to back there, to somebody else, and that thought sometimes rends your heart in a way that you never share with anyone else.”

ThinkingMenWayShouldBelieveHeartSometimesMomentsRememberFacesYoungGirlI BelieveTreeShareMarriedLonelyShould HaveBaseballEvery ManParksBuyingDiamondOaksOak TreeSnowball
Author:James Lee Burke
Create image

“Then the sun broke above the crest of the hills and the entire countryside looked soaked in blood, the arroyos deep in shadow, the cones of dead volcanoes stark and biscuit-colored against the sky. I could smell pinion trees, wet sage, woodsmoke, cattle in the pastures, and creek water that had melted from snow. I could smell the way the country probably was when it was only a dream in the mind of God.”

WayMindCountryDreamWaterSunTreeBloodSkyShadowSmellSnowHillsBrokeWetSageCountrysideStarksCattleVolcanoesPasturesBiscuitsCreeksCones
Book:Jesus Out to Sea: Stories
Create image

“I sometimes subscribe to the belief that all historical events occur simultaneously, like a dream in the mind of God. Perhaps it is only man who views time sequentially and tries to impose a solar calendar upon it. What if other people, both dead and unborn, are living out their lives in the same space we occupy, without our knowledge or consent?" The Glass Rainbow, p. 138”

PeopleIfsMenTryingMindSometimesDreamBeliefSpaceViewsEventsHistoricalGlassesWhat IfRainbowConsentUnbornCalendarsHistorical Events
Book:The Glass Rainbow: A Dave Robicheaux Novel
Create image

“In the alluvial sweep of the land, I thought I could see the past and the present and the future all at once, as though time were not sequential in nature but took place without a beginning or an end, like a flash of green light rippling outward from the center of creation, not unlike a dream inside the mind of God.”

MindEndsDreamLightPastLandCreationGreenFlashGreen Lights
Book:The Glass Rainbow: A Dave Robicheaux Novel
Create image

“Hackberry Holland's greatest fear was his fellow man's propensity to act collectively, in militaristic lockstep, under the banner of God and country. Mobs did not rush across town to do good deeds, and in Hackberry's view, there was no more odious taint on any social or political endeavor than universal approval.”

MenCountryPoliticalSocialViewsUniversalTownsFellowsDeedsEndeavorApprovalGood DeedsFellow ManBannerPropensityHollandGreatest FearGod And Country
Book:The Glass Rainbow: A Dave Robicheaux Novel
Create image

“writing is like being in love. You never get better at it or learn more about it. The day you think you do is the day you lose it. Robert Frost called his work a lover's quarrel with the world. It's ongoing. It has neither a beginning nor an end. You don't have to worry about learning things. The fire of one's art burns all the impurities from the vessel that contains it.”

ThinkingWorldWritingArtEndsLosesWorryFireLove YouLoversGet BetterVesselQuarrelsOngoingBeing In LoveFrostImpurity
Author:James Lee Burke
Create image