Black Cherry Blues Quotes

“I believe every...man remembers the girl he thinks he should have married. She reappears to him in his lonely moments, or he sees her in the face of a young girl in the park, buying a snowball under an oak tree by the baseball diamond. But she belongs to back there, to somebody else, and that thought sometimes rends your heart in a way that you never share with anyone else.”
― James Lee Burke, Black Cherry Blues

“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

“My experience has been that grief and loss do not necessarily become more acceptable with time, and commitment to them is of no value to either the living or the dead.”
― James Lee Burke, Black Cherry Blues

“. . . I had found the edge. The place where you unstrap all your fastenings to the earth, to what you are what you have been, where you flame out on the edge of the spheres, and the sun and moon become eclipsed and the world below is as dead and remote and without interest as if it were glazed with ice. ”
― James Lee Burke, Black Cherry Blues

“Tomorrow has no more existence than yesterday, but you can always control now. We live in a series of nows. Think about now.”
― James Lee Burke, Black Cherry Blues

“Not everybody gets to see a blinding light on the way to Damascus.”
― James Lee Burke, Black Cherry Blues

“Maybe you’ve been there. You go into a police or sheriff’s station after a gang of black kids forced you to stop your car while they smashed out your windows with garbage cans; a strung-out addict made you kneel at gunpoint on the floor of a grocery store, and before you knew it the begging words rose uncontrollably in your throat; some bikers pulled you from the back of a bar and sat on your arms while one of them unzippered his blue jeans. Your body is still hot with shame, your voice full of thumbtacks and strange to your own ears, your eyes full of guilt and self-loathing while uniformed people walk casually by you with Styrofoam cups of coffee in their hands. Then somebody types your words on a report and you realize that this is all you will get.”
― James Lee Burke, Black Cherry Blues

“Sometimes when that kind of evil comes into our lives, we can’t explain it, so we blame it on God or ourselves. In both cases we’re wrong. Maybe it’s time you let yourself out of prison.”
― James Lee Burke, Black Cherry Blues

“I believe that God is not limited by time and space as we are, I believe perhaps that He can influence the past even though it has already happened. So sometimes when I’m alone, especially at night, in the dark, and I begin to dwell on the unbearable suffering that people probably experienced before their deaths, I ask God to retroactively relieve their pain, to be with them in mind and body, to numb their senses, to cool whatever flame licked at their eyes in their final moments.”
― James Lee Burke, Black Cherry Blues

“Cut loose from the past. She wouldn’t want you to carry a burden like this.”

“I can’t. I don’t want to.”
― James Lee Burke, Black Cherry Blues

“We are the sum total of what we have done and where we have been,”
― James Lee Burke, Black Cherry Blues

“Ah, voices, I thought. She believes in them. Which any student of psychology will tell you is a mainline symptom of a schizophrenic personality. But I had never bought very heavily into the psychiatric definitions of singularity and eccentricity in people. In fact, as I reviewed the friendships I had had over the years, I had to conclude that the most interesting ones involved the seriously impaired—the Moe Howard account, the drunken, the mind-smoked, those who began each day with a nervous breakdown, people who hung on to the sides of the planet with suction cups.”
― James Lee Burke, Black Cherry Blues

“You put me in mind of a man who spent his last cent on Ex-Lax and forgot the pay toilet cost a dime.”
― James Lee Burke, Black Cherry Blues

“but ask yourself, have you ever known anyone whose marriage was saved by a marriage counselor, whose drinking was cured by a psychiatrist, whose son was kept out of reform school by a social worker? 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

“Don’t live in tomorrow’s problems.”
― James Lee Burke, Black Cherry Blues

“The rain spun in the yellow arc lights over the café parking lot. It was empty inside, except for a fat Negro woman whom I could see through the service window in the kitchen, and a pretty, redheaded waitress in her early twenties, dressed in a pink uniform with her hair tied up on her freckled neck. She was obviously tired, but she was polite and smiled at me when she took my order, and I felt a sense of guilt, almost shame, at my susceptibility and easy fondness for a young woman's smile. Because if you're forty-nine and unmarried or a widower or if you've simply chosen to live alone, you're easily flattered by a young woman's seeming attention to you, and you forget that it is often simply a deference to your age.”
― James Lee Burke, Black Cherry Blues

“We are the sum total of what we have done and where we have been, and I sincerely believe that in many ways the world in which I grew up was better than the one in which we live today.”
― James Lee Burke, Black Cherry Blues

“fear is an irrational emotion that floats from object to object like a helium balloon that you touch with your fingertips.”
― James Lee Burke, Black Cherry Blues

“The false dawn, with its illusions and mist-wrapped softness, can be as inadequate and fleeting as Morpheus’ gifts.”
― James Lee Burke, Black Cherry Blues

“The false dawn, with its illusions and mist-wrapped softness, can be as inadequate and fleeting as Morpheus’ gifts. CHAPTER 2 The days became warmer the first week in April, and on some mornings I went out on the salt at dawn and seined”
― James Lee Burke, Black Cherry Blues