SL > SL's Quotes

“All drunks, particularly those who grew up in alcoholic homes, have that same sense of angst and trepidation, one that has no explainable origins. The fear is not necessarily self-centered, either. It’s like watching someone point a revolver at his temple while he cocks and dry-fires the mechanism, over and over again, until the cylinder rotates a loaded chamber into firing position.”
― James Lee Burke, Pegasus Descending

“Colored or not, we all pick the white man's cotton.”
― James Lee Burke, Black Cherry Blues

“In a badass, beer-glass brawl, would you rather have an academic liberal covering your back or a hobnailed redneck?”
― James Lee Burke, Black Cherry Blues

“THE ALLURE OF Montana is like a commitment to a narcotic; you can never use it up or get enough of it. Its wilderness areas probably resemble the earth on the first day of creation.”
― James Lee Burke, Light of the World

“The wrong people always worry. The people who are the real problem never worry about anything.”
― James Lee Burke, Wayfaring Stranger

“It's a great burden, being one of the good guys.”
― James Lee Burke, The Neon Rain

“Somehow sleep allows us to see clearly those very things that are obscured by the light of day.”
― James Lee Burke, A Dave Robicheaux Ebook Boxed Set: Neon Rain, Heaven's Prisoners, Excerpt from The Glass Rainbow

“Hope was the light that allowed man to prevail in the worst of circumstances. But it also could become the narcotic of the self-deluded and the naive.”
― James Lee Burke, House of the Rising Sun

“What happens outside of us doesn’t count. That’s something we don’t have control over. It’s what we do with it, the way that we react to it, that’s important.”
― James Lee Burke, A Dave Robicheaux Ebook Boxed Set: Neon Rain, Heaven's Prisoners, Excerpt from The Glass Rainbow

“Through the screen, he could smell the evening as though it were a living presence, the purple and yellow flowers in his yard and the dark green wetness of the fescue part of a song that was never supposed to die. Except he could feel things ending, coming apart at the center, and he didn’t know why.”
― James Lee Burke, Light of the World

“Sometimes your luck runs out and you have to accept the life you had planned was a dream written on water”
― James Lee Burke

“When people make a contract with the devil and give him an air-conditioned office to work in, he doesn’t go back home easily.”
― James Lee Burke, In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead

“I guess that seems like an absurd premise until we consider the possibility that the dead are always with us, beckoning from the shade, reminding us that we’re actors in the same drama they have already lived and that they can help us with our lives if we will only let them.”
― James Lee Burke, Light of the World

“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 , Light of the World

“Anyone can slay a dragon ...but try waking up every morning and loving the world all over again. That's what takes a real hero.”
― Brian Andreas