A Stained White Radiance Quotes

“I bet that guy could steal the stink off of shit”
― James Lee Burke, A Stained White Radiance

“We all have an extended family, people whom we recognize as our own as soon as we see them.”
― James Lee Burke, A Stained White Radiance

“Saint Augustine once admonished that we should never use the truth to injure. I believe there are dark and uncertain moments in our lives when it’s not wrong for each of us to feel that he wrote those words especially for us.”
― James Lee Burke, A Stained White Radiance

“Prosecutors often wince when they have to take a child abuser to trial, because usually the only witnesses they can use are children who are terrified at the prospect of testifying against their parents.”
― James Lee Burke, A Stained White Radiance

“ALL MEN HAVE a religion or totems of some kind. Even the atheist is committed to an enormous act of faith in his belief that the universe created itself and the subsequent creation of intelligent life was simply a biological accident.”
― James Lee Burke, A Stained White Radiance

“her against my”
― James Lee Burke, A Stained White Radiance

“At that moment I realized the error of my thinking about Bootsie. The problem wasn’t in her disease, it was in mine. I wanted a lock on the future; I wanted our marriage to be above the governance of mortality and chance; and, most important, in my nightly sleeplessness over her health, and the black fatigue that I would drag behind me into the day like a rattling junkyard, I hadn’t bothered to be grateful for the things I had.”
― James Lee Burke, A Stained White Radiance

“Whenever I hear and see a politician or a military leader, a bank of American flags at his back, trying to convince us of the rightness of a policy or a deed that will cause harm to others; when I am almost convinced myself that setting humanitarian concern in abeyance can be justified in the interest of a greater good, I pause and ask myself what my brain-smoked friends would have to say.”
― James Lee Burke, A Stained White Radiance

“I read a poem once that had a line in it about a white radiance that stains eternity.”
― James Lee Burke, A Stained White Radiance

“No, I’m a coonass, my religion is shaky, and I’ve never hit the juice.”
― James Lee Burke, A Stained White Radiance

“There are events you witness, or in which you participate, that forever remain sacrosanct and inviolate in memory, no matter how painful that memory is, because of the cost that you or others paid in order to be there in that moment when the camera lens clicked shut.”
― James Lee Burke, A Stained White Radiance

“As a police officer it has been my experience that pedophiles are able to operate and stay functional over long periods of time and victimize scores, even hundreds, of children, because no one wants to believe his or her own intuitions about the symptoms in the perpetrator.”
― James Lee Burke, A Stained White Radiance