Harbor Lights Quotes

“Maybe you’ve had moments like these. You know, when you’re tired and run-down and you let your mind go where it shouldn’t? Loneliness and clinical depression can flay you alive or put you on the rack and not only crack your bones and joints but steal your soul. Here, see for yourself. The sun is orange, the sky blue, the sugarcane across the bayou swaying and clattering like broomsticks. But the sun has no warmth, nor the strength to regenerate itself, and it makes me think of a Halloween pumpkin that has been carved too thin, its candle guttering, the inside of its shell scorched and cracked like old skin, when dust devils climb into the sky and scatter ashes and dust on the bayou’s surface. I try to avoid thoughts such as these and concentrate on the natural gifts of the world and the sublimity of the afternoon. The air is tannic, as moist and pure as cave air, like pine needles and sugarcane stubble plowed under black soil, like an autumnal emanation from the pen of John Keats. I remind myself that the world is a fine place and worth the fighting for, as Ernest Hemingway wrote in For Whom the Bell Tolls.”
― James Lee Burke, Harbor Lights

“Why would he dream about his poor, driven, sad mother now? That was easy. His mother was the only one he loved in his family. And he loved her because she was tormented by her psychological disabilities but was not undone by them. She made him think of a moth inside a windstorm. There was a deep-seated fear that never left her eyes, and a suppressed tension wrapped so tight inside her that she constantly knotted her hands and squeezed her fingernails into the heels. People who claimed to be her friends openly admitted they could not be around her for more than two hours. She in turn told Francis he was the only friend she had in the whole world, and that he should not trust others and that he should model himself on the virtues of his gunfighter ancestors. But she never defined those virtues”
― James Lee Burke, Harbor Lights

“You can go back in time?” “All time happens simultaneously,” she said. “There is no past or present or future. A kind act in what we call the present can undo an evil in what we call the past.”
― James Lee Burke, Harbor Lights

“How did Thomas Aquinas put it? We’re all condemned to err, so why not err on the side of charity?”
― James Lee Burke, Harbor Lights