Lay Down My Sword And Shield Quotes

“As a southerner I had been brought up to believe that through conditioning and experience you could accept with some measure of tranquility any of the flaws in the human situation. But death is one flaw that always lands like a fist in the center of the forehead. No matter how many times you see it, or smell its gray rotting odor, or come close to buying it yourself, each time is always like the first. No amount of earlier experience prepares you for it, and after it happens the world is somehow unfairly diminished and bent out of shape.”
― James Lee Burke, Lay Down My Sword And Shield

“I had always liked to drink, and I’d found that during the drinking process the best feeling came right before you knew you were drunk, that lucid moment of control and perception when all the doors in your mind spring open and the mysteries suddenly reduce themselves to a simple equation.”
― James Lee Burke, Lay Down My Sword And Shield

“Bailey sounds like a sad man.” “He gets some satisfaction from his tragic view. His comparison of himself with me lets him feel correct all the time.”
― James Lee Burke, Lay Down My Sword And Shield

“walls, all objects and natural phenomena have a different color, shape, angle, and association from anything you had ever known previously. And no one who hasn’t been there can understand the light-headed opulent feeling of walking back into the free world. Fifty miles up the”
― James Lee Burke, Lay Down My Sword And Shield

“There’s a line of separation between the world of free people and the confined that you never realize exists until you discover yourself on the opposite side. Once there, behind the barbed wire or mesh screens or concrete”
― James Lee Burke, Lay Down My Sword And Shield

“Even the predators sometimes have to lie under the reef while the shadows of much larger fish move through the dark waters overhead.”
― James Lee Burke, Lay Down My Sword And Shield

“No, I ain’t. I’m shit and nails and all kinds of bad news.”
― James Lee Burke, Lay Down My Sword And Shield

“Praise for JAMES LEE BURKE “James Lee Burke is the reigning champ of nostalgia noir.” —The New York Times Book Review “A gorgeous prose stylist.” —Stephen King “James Lee Burke is the heavyweight champ, a great American novelist whose work, taken individually or as a whole, is unsurpassed.” —Michael Connelly “Burke’s evocative prose remains a thing of reliably fierce wonder.”
― James Lee Burke, Lay Down My Sword And Shield