Feast Day of Fools Quotes

“Hackberry Holland's greatest fear was his fellow man's propensity to act collectively, in militaristic lockstep, under the banner of God and country. Mobs did not rush across town to do good deeds, and in Hackberry's view, there was no more odious taint on any social or political endeavor than universal approval.”
― James Lee Burke, Feast Day of Fools

“documented in a security file was of no concern to him. The fact that a man like Joe Tex could have access to it”
― James Lee Burke, Feast Day of Fools

“Mexico was not a country, Krill thought. It was a revolution that had never stopped.”
― James Lee Burke, Feast Day of Fools

“others, he might as well dip his pen into invisible ink.”
― James Lee Burke, Feast Day of Fools

“But Hackberry knew that if there was any lesson or wisdom in his thoughts, he would not be able to pass it on. The only wisdom an old man learns in this world is that his life experience is ultimately his sole possession. It is also the measure of his worth as a human being, the sum of his offering to whatever hand created him, and the ticket he carries with him into eternity. But if a man tries to put all the lessons he has learned on a road map for”
― James Lee Burke, Feast Day of Fools

“You won’t gun me unless I give you cause.” “What brought you to that conclusion?” the sheriff said. “Your father was a history professor and a congressman. You were born with the burden of gentility, Sheriff: You either obey the restraints that are imposed on a gentleman or you accept the role of a hypocrite. The great gift of being born white trash is that no matter what you do, it’s always a step up.”
― James Lee Burke, Feast Day of Fools

“Also, it is a very serious offense to bring guns into Mexico.” “That’s like saying it’s a serious offense to bring insanity into a lunatic asylum,” Pam said.”
― James Lee Burke, Feast Day of Fools

“I’m trusting you. I don’t do that with most people.” “Do whatever you want, sir. But don’t expect me to feel flattered.”
― James Lee Burke, Feast Day of Fools

“his dreams would take him to a place that was as much a part of his future as it was his past. He remembered the words of the writer Paul Fussell, who had said he joined the army to fight the war for its duration and had discovered that he would have to fight it every day and every night for the rest of his life.”
― James Lee Burke, Feast Day of Fools

“You are brave in ways that few men are, Negrito. But do not try to think anymore. For some men, thinking is a dangerous vanity. You must accept that about yourself.”
― James Lee Burke, Feast Day of Fools

“You make a complexity of everything,” Negrito said. “You are a man who cannot bear to have a quiet and simple thought. You constantly construct spiderwebs so you can walk through them.”
― James Lee Burke, Feast Day of Fools

“Some people say insomnia is a disorder. I say it’s not,” the man said, the wind ruffling the brim of his hat and fanning open his coat over his flat stomach. “I say it’s a mark of somebody who sees things as they are.”
― James Lee Burke, Feast Day of Fools

“sliding down the bottle neck and wrapping around his wrist like a white snake.”
― James Lee Burke, Feast Day of Fools

“When Danny Boy drank, he did it methodically and with dedication, his time frame open-ended, his progress from the first drink to the last as steady and unrelenting and disciplined as anyone’s can be while he is systematically sawing himself apart. His benders lasted from a few days to a few weeks, and they always commenced when a clock inside him would go off without warning and a voice would whisper, It’s time. Danny Boy never argued with the voice. He would fill a bucket with crushed ice he bought from a filling station down the road, unlock the shed where he kept his beer and liquor, and stuff a dozen bottles of Corona into the ice. Then he would sit down at a plank table that overlooked the miles of ancient topography to the south, pour three inches of Bacardi into a jelly glass, and snap the cap off a Corona, the foam sliding”
― James Lee Burke, Feast Day of Fools

“You feared whiskey in your dreams or in a store window or behind a bar, not when you drank it, Hackberry thought. You feared death only as long as you held on to life. Mr. Death lost his dominion as soon as you faced and engaged him and dared him to do his worst.”
― James Lee Burke, Feast Day of Fools

“HACKBERRY HOLLAND HAD come to believe that age was a separate country you did not try to explain to younger people, primarily because they had already made up their minds about it and any lessons you had learned from your life were not the kind many people were interested in hearing about. If age brought gifts, he didn’t know what they were. It had brought him neither wisdom nor peace of mind. His level of desire was the same, the lust of his youth glowing hot among the ashes each morning he woke. He could say with a degree of satisfaction that he didn’t suffer fools and drove from his company anyone who tried to waste his time, but otherwise his dreams and his waking day were defined by the same values and frame of reference that came with his birthright. If age had marked a change in him, it lay in his acceptance that loneliness and an abiding sense of loss were the only companions some people would ever have.”
― James Lee Burke, Feast Day of Fools

“You think too much, Negrito,” Krill said. “When a man thinks too much, he’s tempted to go beyond his limitations.”
― James Lee Burke, Feast Day of Fools

“Hackberry removed his hat and knocked a dent out of the crown and put it back on. He felt old in the way people feel old when they have more knowledge of the world than they need. In”
― James Lee Burke, Feast Day of Fools

“The compulsion to kill was in the gene pool, he thought. Those who denied it were the same ones who killed through proxy. Every professional executioner, every professional soldier, knew that one of his chief duties was to protect those he served from knowledge about themselves. Or at least those were the perceptions that governed Hackberry’s judgments about societal behavior, even though he shared them with no one.”
― James Lee Burke, Feast Day of Fools

“Hackberry Holland’s greatest fear was his fellow man’s propensity to act collectively, in militaristic lockstep, under the banner of God and country. Mobs did not rush across town to do good deeds, and in Hackberry’s view, there was no more odious taint on any social or political endeavor than universal approval.”
― James Lee Burke, Feast Day of Fools

“Pray that liars aren’t kept a long time in purgatory”
― James Lee Burke, Feast Day of Fools

“But a line sergeant told me something I never forgot. ‘Don’t think about it before it happens, and don’t think about it when it’s over.”
― James Lee Burke, Feast Day of Fools

“They seemed to have the coloration and texture of the rubber in a pencil eraser. They”
― James Lee Burke, Feast Day of Fools

“He knows things don’t happen in order, like past, present, and future.”
― James Lee Burke, Feast Day of Fools

“just another gargoyle that took up temporary residence in Danny Boy’s dreams and went away. “Some people say insomnia is a disorder.”
― James Lee Burke, Feast Day of Fools

“his motor control still functioned but his soul went somewhere else.”
― James Lee Burke, Feast Day of Fools

“Instead, he lived inside his loneliness”
― James Lee Burke, Feast Day of Fools

“But as John Steinbeck had said long ago, we had come to fear a man with a hole in his shoe.”
― James Lee Burke, Feast Day of Fools

“Sometimes if you listen, you can hear the earth stop, like it's waiting for you to catch up with it. Like it's your friend and it wants you to be at peace with it.”
― James Lee Burke, Feast Day of Fools

“Wars of enormous importance are fought in places nobody cares about.”
― James Lee Burke, Feast Day of Fools