Clete Quotes

“Every soldier who has been in a war zone knows this terrible truth: The innocent suffer the greatest, from Nanking to Hiroshima, from Dresden to Wounded Knee, from the Polish ghetto to the deliberate starvation of the Irish. “Thank”
― James Lee Burke, Clete

“Keep people poor, keep them scared, and you can do anything you want with them. Tell me one exception.”
― James Lee Burke, Clete

“I was still hungover and wanted to unscrew my head and float it down the bayou. You know what I have never figured out about booze? Without exception, every experience I ever had with it was bad. It was the same for Streak, and the same for every lush I ever knew. How fucked up is that?”
― James Lee Burke, Clete

“Tell me this: How successful have you been when you’ve tried to save others from themselves?”
― James Lee Burke, Clete

“I wake in the morning and feel a sickness in the pit of my stomach I cannot understand. It seems to have no source. I feel like I’m walking around with buckets on my feet and a wool blanket wrapped tightly around my head. No one who has not experienced it can understand or talk about it. You feel you’re inside a painting that is melting and running down the canvas. Talking about it now makes my head damp and cold at the same”
― James Lee Burke, Clete

“I did not trust the era I lived in, nor did I want to live in it. The twentieth century had been the most violent in human history. The amount of killing had no precedent, and I had the feeling it was about to get started again, and once more by those who had never gone to war but gloated over the graves they spread through a neocolonial world. If I had to go to war again, I'd like to do it against those bastards.”
― James Lee Burke, Clete

“Hey, you guys have gotten your tickets punched a few times, or you wouldn’t be reading this. You’re either in the club or you’re not. The great enemy is time. It wears away stone and collapses arctic ice; it sinks ancient cities beneath the ocean and isolates giant arks on mountaintops and, if we let it, robs the light from our eyes. But the heart is its own measure; if it wishes, it can live forever when you accept the heart as a music box, a magical gift, one that’s aways there, like a rustling of the spheres or the leaves bouncing along the pavement deep down in the fall. A rainbow is up there. Don’t let anybody tell you there’s not. I said it’s only rock and roll? Wrong. It’s a poem, brother. Or sister.”
― James Lee Burke, Clete

“He said he thinks everything in existence happens simultaneously; there is no past, present, or future; it’s as though you’re in a dream inside the mind of God.”
― James Lee Burke, Clete

“Why your eyes wet, Mr. Clete?” “I got hay fever,” I said. “No, you no understand yourself, Mr. Clete. Somebody make you hate yourself when you little boy, and now you think you no good. You stop thinking like that ever again.” “Okay,”
― James Lee Burke, Clete

“The great enemy is time. It wears away stone and collapses arctic ice; it sinks ancient cities beneath the ocean and isolates giant arks on mountaintops and, if we let it, robs the light from our eyes. But the heart is its own measure; if it wishes, it can live forever when you accept the heart as a music box, a magical gift, one that’s aways there, like a rustling of the spheres or the leaves bouncing along the pavement deep down in the fall. A rainbow is up there. Don’t let anybody tell you there’s not.”
― James Lee Burke, Clete

“Everybody here probably thinks the Jews killed Christ. That’s a lie. Read the Book of Acts, chapter 4, verse 27. It’s written by St. Luke. The Romans and Pontius Pilate and Herod and a handful of bums in the Sanhedrin and some loafers in the courtyard were the culprits.”
― James Lee Burke, Clete

“Stay silent when they expect you to speak. Yawn at their rages. Turn yourself into a mystery. Never bargain or argue. Smile if one of them strikes you. His anger will turn upon him.”
― James Lee Burke, Clete

“wanted to be there at that special moment when the sky lights with a special kind of flame, one that issues from the rim of the Earth and trails curds of purple-and-red smoke to the top of the heavens.”
― James Lee Burke, Clete

“Black Elk Speaks.”
― James Lee Burke, Clete

“books about the American West, such as A. B. Guthrie’s The Big Sky and The Way West and John Neihardt’s”
― James Lee Burke, Clete

“Like Waylon Jennings said, “I’ve always been crazy, but it’s kept me from going insane.”
― James Lee Burke, Clete

“You know why an education, formal or self-acquired, is worth more than Fort Knox? Other people can’t wind up your clock. Not unless you let them.”
― James Lee Burke, Clete

“His hair was still curly and uncut and metallic in color and full of grease, his unshaved face thick with whiskers as course as steel filings, his trousers stiff with grime. This was the Aryan race at its greatest?”
― James Lee Burke, Clete

“You think we might have rain?” he said. “Yeah,” I said. “Maybe a real frog-stringer.” Down South that means the clouds will rain frogs.”
― James Lee Burke, Clete

“You don’t silhouette on a hill; you don’t wear civilian jewelry; you don’t make enemies with people in records or people who handle your food; you don’t make enemies with people who know where you are when you don’t know where they are; and lastly, you don’t let your enemies know when you’re hurt; instead you swallow your blood and spit in their faces.”
― James Lee Burke, Clete

“back step and bit into the French bread and the sliced onions and ham and tomatoes and mayonnaise and sauce piquante, and almost fainted at how good it was. Let’s face it. We’re talking about food that some people consider orgasmic.”
― James Lee Burke, Clete

“We were dealing with a handful of people. Only one of them had real power, and that was Lauren Bow, and that was because he had money. But real power lies in government and politics. So far the only political move Lauren Bow had made was with a group called the New Rising. In my lifetime I had seen numerous groups come and go. Their names change, but their membership remains the same—people who feel they have been left out. They blame immigrants and women and gay people and Jews and Blacks and anyone else they can pick on. Needless to say, most of them are not bright and get chewed up and spat out by the rich people who exploit them.”
― James Lee Burke, Clete

“I woke up late Saturday morning and could hear rain dripping off the oak trees and see sunlight edging the window shades, and knew it was going to be a good day. At least I hoped. I’ve learned that in depression you should not ask for things or start to plan or try to analyze. If you do, you’re asking for it. You have to be quiet inside your mind. Music helps. But your own noise can rip out your insides, particularly in the early morning hours. Remember the lyrics “light my fire” from the 1960s? Do. Not. Even. Think. Those. Words.”
― James Lee Burke, Clete

“now, and I went to a café in the Black district and loaded up on deep-fried chicken and shrimp, dirty rice, Cajun fries, mashed potatoes with milk gravy, and a bucket of ice cream. I met Helen and Hawthorne at a picnic table by the bayou in City Park. Hawthorne ate like he hadn’t eaten a decent meal in weeks. “What’s the average lifespan around here?” he asked. “We don’t keep records,” Helen said.”
― James Lee Burke, Clete

“In Louisiana, the third meal of the day is supper. The second meal is dinner. It was close to supper”
― James Lee Burke, Clete

“It’s hard to be a drunk sometimes. Why? Because alcoholism is an incremental form of suicide.”
― James Lee Burke, Clete

“Colonel Mouton. Did you know the Episcopalian church on West Main was a Confederate field hospital? That’s right. When the Yankees captured it, they pushed the pews together and turned them into feed troughs for their horses.” She was sniffling but had stopped crying. “How do you know all this?” she asked. “I read books,” I said.”
― James Lee Burke, Clete

“to Tommy Dorsey and Albert Ammons and Benny Goodman and the Platters and Doris Day. I changed my mind about the good old days. They were great. Or think about it this way: Would you rather listen to Lionel Hampton or a guy bouncing up and down while grabbing his crotch? Gee, I don’t know.”
― James Lee Burke, Clete

“Actually, I think that’s the better way to go. Most of the things we plan don’t turn out too well, so what the heck. How about World War I? The royal families who started it thought it would be over in a few weeks. Four years and twenty million deaths later they were still thinking on it.”
― James Lee Burke, Clete

“I closed the office, put down the top of my lavender-pink Eldorado Cadillac, and, like Chuck Berry said, motorated down the bayou to Jeanerette, Louisiana, in St. Mary Parish country, where, in a snap of your fingers, you can be back in the fourteenth century. # #”
― James Lee Burke, Clete