Creole Belle Quotes

“Age is a peculiar kind of thief. It slips up on you and steps inside your skin and is so quiet and methodical in its work that you never realize it has stolen your youth until you look into the mirror one morning and see a man you don't recognize.”
― James Lee Burke, Creole Belle

“I also believe my home state is cursed by ignorance and poverty and racism, much of it deliberately inculcated to control a vulnerable electorate. And I believe many of the politicians in Louisiana are among the most stomach-churning examples of white trash and venality I have ever known. To me, the fact that large numbers of people find them humorously picaresque is mind numbing, on a level with telling fond tales of one's rapist.”
― James Lee Burke, Creole Belle

“I'm over the hill for come-on lines. On a quiet day, I can hear my liver rotting. For exercise, I fall down.”
― James Lee Burke, Creole Belle

“No one likes to be afraid. Fear is the enemy of love & faith & it robs us of our sleep & our sunrise & makes us treacherous & venal& fills our glands with toxins & effaces our identity & gives flight to any vestige of self respect. If you have ever been afraid, truly afraid, in a way that makes your hair soggy with sweat & turns your skin gray & fouls your blood & spiritually eviscerates you to the point you cannot pray, lest your prayers be a concession to your conviction that you're about to die, you know what I am talking about. If you do not have the option of either fleeing or attacking your adversary, your level of fear will grow to the point where you feel like your skin is being stripped from your bones.”
― James Lee Burke, Creole Belle

“The Gulf Stream waters of Woody Guthrie's famous song were strung with columns of oil that were several miles long.”
― James Lee Burke, Creole Belle

“As a revolutionary people, we Americans won a probable victory over the best and biggest army in the world because we learned to fight from the Indians. You can do a lot of damage with a Kentucky rifle from behind a tree. You don't put on a peaked hat and a red coat and white leggings and crossed white bandoleers with a big silver buckle in the center of the X and march uphill into a line of Howitzers loaded with chain and chopped horseshoes.”
― James Lee Burke, Creole Belle

“The air smelled like Bayou Teche when it's spring and the fish are spawning among the water hyacinths and the frogs are throbbing in the cattails and the flooded cypress.”
― James Lee Burke, Creole Belle

“I would like to believe that there is a resolution in the human tragedy and that order can be reimposed upon the earth in the same way it occurs in the fifth act of the Elizabethan drama that supposedly mirrors our lives. My experience has been otherwise. History seldom corrects itself in its own sequence, and when we mete out justice, we often do it in a fashion that perpetuates the evil of the transgressors and breathes new life into the descendants of Cain. I would like to believe the instincts of the mob can be exorcised from the species or genetically bred out of it. But there is no culture in the history of the world that has not lauded its warriors over its mystics. Sometimes in an idle moment, I try to recall the names of five slaves out of the whole sorry history of human bondage whose lives we celebrate. I have never had much success.”
― James Lee Burke, Creole Belle

“Varina was breathing hard through her nose, her face pinched, not unlike a child’s. “You don’t know how mad you can make people,” she said. “I had tender feelings for you once, whether you knew it or not. But you’re a shit, Dave Robicheaux.”
― James Lee Burke, Creole Belle

“You just got sprung."
"Nig Rosewater out there?" Clete asked.
"Nig Rosewater hasn't been up at this hour since World War II.”
― James Lee Burke, Creole Belle

“When death stole the love of your life, no amount of revenge ever healed the hole in your heart. You lived with anger and physical yearnings that were insatiable, and you went about dismantling yourself on a daily basis, tendon and joint, for the rest of your days, all the time wearing the mask of a court jester.”
― James Lee Burke, Creole Belle

“Many years back I gave up all claim to a rational view of the world and even avoided people who believed that the laws of physics and causality have any application when it comes to understanding the mysteries of creation or the fact that light can enter the eye and form an image in the brain and send a poetic tendril down the arm into a clutch of fingers that could write the Shakespearean sonnets.”
― James Lee Burke, Creole Belle

“For me, Louisiana has always been a haunted place. I believe the specters of slaves and Houma and Atakapa Indians and pirates and Confederate soldiers and Acadian farmers and plantation belles are still out there in the mist. I believe their story has never been adequately told and they will never rest until it is. I also believe my home state is cursed by ignorance and poverty and racism, much of it deliberately inculcated to control a vulnerable electorate. And I believe many of the politicians in Louisiana are among the most stomach-churning examples of white trash and venality I have ever known. To me, the fact that large numbers of people find them humorously picaresque is mind-numbing, on a level with telling fond tales about one’s rapist.”
― James Lee Burke, Creole Belle

“Like many people who are made different, either in the womb or because they grew up in a dysfunctional home, Helen had spent a lifetime puzzling through all the reasons she had been arbitrarily rejected by others. Therapists often identify this particular behavioral syndrome with individuals who are weak and obsessed with concerns that are of no consequence. Nothing could be further from the truth. The only reason most of these individuals become survivors and not suicides or serial killers is because they finally figure out that the world did a number on them and their rejection is undeserved and is on the world and not on them. “Run the tape backward,” Helen said. “She’s rebellious over issues nobody cares about. She”
― James Lee Burke, Creole Belle

“We don’t care what people say, rock and roll is here to stay,’” he said. “That’s from Danny and the Juniors, the greatest single line in the history of music.”
― James Lee Burke, Creole Belle

“He scraped a pork chop and two eggs out of the frying pan and slid them off the spatula onto a plate. “You sure you don’t want any?” “You know how much grease is in that stuff?” “That’s why I’ve never had problems with arthritis. The grease in your food oils your joints and your connective tissue. Nobody in my family has ever had arthritis.” “Because they didn’t live long enough,” I replied.”
― James Lee Burke, Creole Belle

“Maybe you’ll have better luck dealing with the dead than I. They go where they want. They sit on your bed at night and stand behind you in the mirror. Once they locate you, they never rest. And you know what’s worse about them?” He smiled at me and didn’t reply. “When it’s your time, they’ll be your escorts, and they won’t be delivering you to a very good place. The dead are not given to mercy.”
― James Lee Burke, Creole Belle

“In the world of the very rich, obtuseness may not quite rise to the level of a virtue, but it’s often the norm.”
― James Lee Burke, Creole Belle

“I’m taking you to Iberia General.” “No, you’re not. Whatever is in my chest is going to stay in my chest. Listen to me, Dave. At a certain point in your life, you accept the consequences of your choices, and you play the hand out. I’m not going to have anybody cutting on me or sticking tubes down my throat or injecting radium into my bloodstream. If I catch the bus with an eggnog and Hennessy in my hand, that’s the way it flushes.” “Hospitals are bad, and eggnog and booze are good. Do you know how dumb that sounds?” “That’s the only way I know how to think.” “It’s not funny.”
― James Lee Burke, Creole Belle

“I always thought their masterpiece was the night they hauled away a corrupt judge’s sports car from his driveway and returned it to the same spot before dawn, compacted into a gleaming block of crushed metal not much larger than a footlocker. Ozone Eddy was to New Orleans what mustard gas was to trench warfare; you tried to stay upwind from him, but it was not an easy task.”
― James Lee Burke, Creole Belle

“Die, Motherfuckers held what is called a group-conscience meeting, and Eddy was told to hit the bricks and never come back unless he wanted his head shoved up a Harley-Davidson exhaust pipe.”
― James Lee Burke, Creole Belle

“The lowest of the low-bottom groups in Jefferson and Orleans parishes was the Work the Steps or Die, Motherfucker meeting, a collection of outlaw bikers, prostitutes, street bums, wet-brains, and violent offenders known in Angola as “big stripes.” After”
― James Lee Burke, Creole Belle

“Theologians and philosophers try to understand and explain the nature of God with varying degrees of success and failure. I admire their efforts. But I’ve never come to an understanding of man’s nature, much less God’s. Does it make sense that the same species that created Athenian democracy and the Golden Age of Pericles and the city of Florence also gifted us with the Inquisition and Dresden and the Nanking Massacre? My insight into my fellow man is probably less informed than it was half a century ago. At my age, that’s not a reassuring thought.”
― James Lee Burke, Creole Belle

“Frankly, I don’t care what happens to your father, Varina. He’s an ignorant, stupid man, a racist, and a bully who molested black women and jailed and beat their men. His sin lies not in his ignorance and stupidity but in his choice to stay ignorant and stupid.”
― James Lee Burke, Creole Belle

“Either way, it was a grand afternoon, one that presaged an even better evening and access to all the fruits the world had to offer.”
― James Lee Burke, Creole Belle

“Nova Scotia in 1755 fell into decline and became associated with ignorance and failure and poverty. The fisher-people of southern Louisiana became ashamed of who they were.”
― James Lee Burke, Creole Belle

“Gretchen, talent doesn’t have anything to do with a person’s background or education. Did you ever see Amadeus? It’s the story of Mozart and his rivalry with Antonio Salieri. Salieri hated Mozart because he thought God had given this great talent to an undeserving idiot. Talent isn’t earned, it’s given. It’s like getting hit by lightning in the middle of a wet pasture. People don’t sign up for it.”
― James Lee Burke, Creole Belle

“existed in inverse proportion to the defenselessness of the working people they exploited and injured.”
― James Lee Burke, Creole Belle

“The art world is controlled by a handful of people in New York. Most of them are idiots who think a screened-in piece of ham swarming with flies constitutes expression. There are many fraudulent aspects to American life, but the art world is probably the most egregious.”
― James Lee Burke, Creole Belle

“For some reason, each moment I spent with him made me feel that I had been diminished.”
― James Lee Burke, Creole Belle