Robicheaux (Dave Robicheaux #21)

by James Lee Burke

people in groups are to be feared and that arguing with others is folly and the knowledge of one generation cannot be passed down to the next.

there is no afterlife but only one life, a continuum in which all time occurs at once,

the only argument you ever win is the one you don’t have.

the world I had known was being airbrushed out of a painting.

If God had a daughter, I bet He wouldn’t have let her die on a cross.

“I’ll take weird over rational any day of the week,”

whocking sounds of tennis balls

Probably one third of cops are dedicated to the job; one third eat too many doughnuts; and one third are people who should not be given power over others. Female detectives do not show off their cleavage. Many cops carry a drop or a throw-down. Cops plant evidence and lie on the stand. In our midst are sadists and racists who taint the rest of us. And the greatest contributor to solving crimes is not the lab but the informant, usually someone who skipped toilet training and couldn’t make a peanut butter sandwich with a diagram.

“Rich man’s war, poor man’s fight.

“Whenever I hear people talk about white superiority, I have to pause and think back on some of the white people I’ve known. It’s a depressing moment.”

Solitude and peace with oneself are probably the only preparation one has for death.

there are moments when we understand that the earth and the sky and the presences that may lie behind them are always with us.

There is a purity in catastrophe. We see firsthand the nature of both human courage and human frailty, the destructive and arbitrary power of the elements, the breakdown of social restraint and our mechanical inventions and the release of the savage that hides in the collective unconscious. An emergency room lit only by flashlights and filled with the moans of the dying and feet sloshing in water becomes a medieval scene no different than one penned by Victor Hugo. It is under these circumstances that we discover who we are, for good or bad. And when all this passes, we never talk about it, lest we lose the insight it gave us.

he could recite from the telephone directory and turn it into the Sermon on the Mount.

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.”

“Fuck it” is not profanity. “Fuck it” is a sonnet.

hostility and fear are first cousins,”

hostility was also a first cousin of guilt.

Individuals don’t change history. History finds the individual.

“Don’t go into a bad neighborhood by yourself.”

Our politicians are an embarrassment and give avarice and mendacity a bad name.

belief that the world was mad, that most 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.

“The past has no reality. The world belongs to the living.”