Crusader's Cross Quotes

“I believe the causes that create them [serial killers] are theological in nature, rather than societal. I believe they make a conscious choice to erase God's thumbprint from their souls.”
― James Lee Burke, Crusader's Cross

“Some people say you pick up the Dirty Boogie where you left it off. Others say you pick it up where you would have been had you never gotten off it.”
― James Lee Burke, Crusader's Cross

“The wind smelled of humus, lichen, the musky odor of pecan husks broken under the shoe, a sunshower on the fields across the bayou. But any poetry that might have been contained in that moment was lost when I stared into Honoria's face, convinced that human insanity was as close to our fingertips as the act of rubbing fog off a window pane.”
― James Lee Burke, Crusader's Cross

“I would almost forget about Ida Durbin. But a sin of omission, if indeed that's what it was, can be like the rusty head of a hatchet buried in the heartwood of a tree -- it eventually finds the teeth of a whirling saw blade.”
― James Lee Burke, Crusader's Cross

“My experience with age it instills a degree of patience in some, leaves the virtuous spiritually unchanged, feeds the character defects in others, and brings little wisdom to any of us.”
― James Lee Burke, Crusader's Cross

“Jimmie would forever be the Renaissance humanist, bearing his faith and optimism like a white light inside a chalice.”
― James Lee Burke, Crusader's Cross

“There are not many places left in the United States where people can get off the computer, stop filing tax returns, and in effect become invisible. The rain forests in the Cascades and parts of West Montana come to mind, and perhaps the ’Glades still offer hope to those who wish to resign from modern times. The other place is the Atchafalaya Basin.”
― James Lee Burke, Crusader's Cross

“But I should have known you don’t publicly challenge a man whose ego is as tender as an infected gland and simply walk away from it.”
― James Lee Burke, Crusader's Cross

“The person who believes he can rise to a position of wealth and power in the state of Louisiana and not do business with the devil probably knows nothing about the devil and even less about Louisiana.”
― James Lee Burke, Crusader's Cross

“It has been my experience that age brings few gifts, but one of them is the acceptance that the past is the past, for good or bad, and if you are fortunate enough to have lived in an era that was truly exceptional, characterized by music, chopped-down Fords with chrome-plated engines roaring full out against purple sunsets, and drive-in restaurants where kids jitterbugged and did the dirty bop and knew they would never die, then those moments are forever inviolate, never to be shared or explained, and, like images on a Grecian urn, never subject to time and decay. Why make them less by trying to re-create them?”
― James Lee Burke, Crusader's Cross

“Evidently, Val had long been possessed of a secret ambition to become a historical writer, an ambition that ironically he could have fulfilled without any help from anyone else. But Val was one of those who defined himself in terms of the control he exerted over others rather than in terms of what he accomplished as an individual.”
― James Lee Burke, Crusader's Cross

“down with the decks awash and the guns blazing. Our moral failure lies in the frailty of our vision and not in our hearts. Our undoing is in our collective willingness to trust those whom we shouldn’t, those who invariably used our best instincts against us. But as a police officer I also learned long ago that justice finds us in its own time and of its own accord, and in ways we never, and I mean absolutely never, anticipate.”
― James Lee Burke, Crusader's Cross

“CAPITALISTS ARE HANGED by the rope they sell their enemies. Mystics who help formulate great religious movements writhe in sexual torment over impure thoughts a shoe salesman leaves behind with adolescence. A Crusader knight in search of the True Cross returns to Marseilles from Palestine with a trunkful of Saracen robes, inside of which is a plague-infested mouse. My experience had been, like George Orwell’s, that human beings are possessed of much more courage and self-sacrifice than we give them credit for, and when the final test comes, they usually go”
― James Lee Burke, Crusader's Cross

“You’re being set up again, I told myself. But sometimes your only option is to play out the hand, no matter what the consequences. Sometimes when you’re deep in Indian country, the only speeds available are full throttle and fuck it.”
― James Lee Burke, Crusader's Cross

“Few of the men shaved more than once every five or six days. Many of the women, most of whom were tattooed, considered themselves fortunate to have a job in a car wash. Anybody there whose life didn’t trail clouds of chaos possessed the spiritual eminence of St. Francis of Assisi.”
― James Lee Burke, Crusader's Cross

“I ATTENDED THE FRIDAY noon meeting of an AA bunch known as the Insanity Group. The meeting was held in a dilapidated house in a poor section of town, and was supposedly a nonsmoking one. But people lit up in both the front and back doorways and flooded the house’s interior with amounts of smoke that few bars contain. The people in the Insanity Group had paid hard dues—in jails, detox units, car wrecks, and the kind of beer-glass brawls that quickly turn homicidal.”
― James Lee Burke, Crusader's Cross

“My experience with age is that it instills a degree of patience in some, leaves the virtuous spiritually unchanged, feeds the character defects in others, and brings little wisdom to any of us.”
― James Lee Burke, Crusader's Cross

“The fact that the goods they buy are often shoddily made, the clothes sewn in Third World sweatshops by people not unlike themselves, is an abstraction that seems to have no application to the low price on the item.”
― James Lee Burke, Crusader's Cross

“The sweeping breadth of the store’s interior was crowded with people for whom a Wal-Mart is a gift from God. In my hometown, most of these are poor and uneducated, and assume that the low-paying jobs that define their lives are commonplace throughout the country.”
― James Lee Burke, Crusader's Cross

“At that time in New Iberia there were black people still alive who remembered the Emancipation, what they came to call “Juneteenth,” and there were white people who had seen General Banks’s Federal soldiers, twenty thousand of them, march through town in pursuit of the chivalric Confederate general, Alfred Mouton.”
― James Lee Burke, Crusader's Cross

“In the state of Louisiana, systemic venality is a given. The state’s culture, mind-set, religious attitudes, and economics are no different from those of a Caribbean nation. The person who believes he can rise to a position of wealth and power in the state of Louisiana and not do business with the devil probably knows nothing about the devil and even less about Louisiana.”
― James Lee Burke, Crusader's Cross

“QUESTION: What can dumb and fearful people always be counted on to do? Answer: To try to control and manipulate everyone in their environment. Question: What is the tactic used by these same dumb people as they try to control others? Answer: They lie.”
― James Lee Burke, Crusader's Cross

“In the darkness I drove to the cemetery in St. Martinville where my third wife, Bootsie, was buried. Bayou Teche was coated with fog, the crypts beaded with moisture as big as marbles. Downstream I could see the steeple of the old French church impaled against the stars, and the massive Evangeline oak under which I first kissed Bootsie Mouton and discovered how the world could become a cathedral in the time it takes for two people to press their mouths against one another.”
― James Lee Burke, Crusader's Cross

“Our parents were illiterate and barely spoke English, but they were among the most brave and resourceful people I ever knew. Neither of them would consciously set about to do wrong. But they destroyed one another just the same—my father with his alcoholism, my mother with her lust and insatiable need for male attention. Then they destroyed their self-respect, their family, and their home. They did all this with the innocence of people who had never been farther away from their Cajun world than their weekend honeymoon trip to New Orleans.”
― James Lee Burke, Crusader's Cross

“The wind smelled of humus, lichen, the musky odor of pecan husks broken under the shoe, a sunshower on the fields across the bayou. But any poetry that might have been contained in that moment was lost when I stared into Honoria’s face, convinced that human insanity was as close to our fingertips as the act of rubbing fog off a windowpane. Honoria’s eyes remained fixed on mine, expectant, somehow trusting, the redness of her mouth and the mole next to it as inviting as a poisonous flower.”
― James Lee Burke, Crusader's Cross

“The Buddhists believe the dead don’t know they’re dead. So maybe some people die and go to hell and never know it. It’s just another day. Like this one, now. Do you think that’s true? That hell is just a place you step into on an ordinary day?”
― James Lee Burke, Crusader's Cross

“Do you remember the night you drove me home from the dance at the country club?” she asked. “No, I don’t remember that.” “You probably wouldn’t. I had to put you to bed rather than the other way around.” “I used to have blackouts, Honoria. I did a lot of things that are still inside a dark box somewhere. I don’t know if I want to revisit them.”
― James Lee Burke, Crusader's Cross

“That evening I drove down the bayou to attend a meeting of our church-annex committee. The back road to Jeanerette is like a geographical odyssey through Louisiana’s history and the disparities that make it less than real and difficult to categorize. The pastureland is emerald green in spring and summer, dotted with cattle and clumps of oak and gum trees, the early sugar cane waving in the richest alluvial soil in America. At sunset, Bayou Teche is high and dark from the spring rains; the air smells of gardenia and magnolia; and antebellum homes glow among the trees with a soft electrical whiteness that makes one wonder if perhaps the Confederacy should not have won the War Between the States after all.”
― James Lee Burke, Crusader's Cross

“WAS A WIDOWER and lived by myself in New Iberia, a city of twenty-five thousand people on Bayou Teche in the southwestern part of the state. For years I had been a detective with the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department and also the owner of a bait shop and boat rental business outside of town. But after Alafair, my adopted daughter, went away to college and the home my father built in 1935 burned to the ground, I sold the baitshop and dock to an elderly black man named Batist and moved into a shotgun house on East Main, on the banks of the Teche, in a neighborhood where the oak and pecan trees, the azaleas, Confederate roses, and philodendron managed to both hide and accentuate the decayed elegance of a bygone era.”
― James Lee Burke, Crusader's Cross

“Molly Boyle and I made love in the bedroom, in the slow
and unhurried fashion of people who are secure in the knowledge the two of them, together,
have legitimate claim on the next day, and that mortality and the demands of the world are no
longer of great importance. What better moment could human beings create for themselves?
Let the world, at least for tonight, find its own answers for a change, I told myself.”
― James Lee Burke, Crusader's Cross