Pegasus Descending Quotes

“Louisiana is a fresh-air mental asylum.”
― James Lee Burke, Pegasus Descending

“A lie is an act of theft. It steals people's faith and makes them resent themselves”
― James Lee Burke, Pegasus Descending

“All drunks, particularly those who grew up in alcoholic homes, have that same sense of angst and trepidation, one that has no explainable origins. The fear is not necessarily self-centered, either. It’s like watching someone point a revolver at his temple while he cocks and dry-fires the mechanism, over and over again, until the cylinder rotates a loaded chamber into firing position.”
― James Lee Burke, Pegasus Descending

“New Iberia is not New Orleans and we do not share its violent history, one that in the past has included a homicide rate equaled only by that of Washington, D.C. Here, whites and people of color work and live side by side. But nonetheless a peculiar kind of racial ill ease still exists in our small city on Bayou Teche. Maybe it’s indicative of the shadow that the pre–civil rights era still casts upon all the states of the old Confederacy. Perhaps we fear our own memories. I think as white people we know deep down inside ourselves the exact nature of the deeds we or our predecessors committed against people of color. I think we know that if our roles were reversed, if we had suffered the same degree of injury that was imposed upon the Negro race, we would not be particularly magnanimous when payback time rolled around. I think we know that in all probability we would cut the throats of the people who had made our lives miserable.”
― James Lee Burke, Pegasus Descending

“themselves at the hip with the forces of darkness, they incorporate into their lives a form of moral insanity that is neither curable nor subject to analysis. They enjoy inflicting pain, and view charity and forgiveness as signals of both weakness and opportunity. The only form of remediation they understand is force. The victim who believes otherwise condemns himself to the death of a thousand cuts.”
― James Lee Burke, Pegasus Descending

“But I knew that Raguza belonged to that group of human beings whose pathology is always predictable. By reason of either genetic defect, environmental”
― James Lee Burke, Pegasus Descending

“If age brings either wisdom or answers to ancient questions, it has made an exception for me.”
― James Lee Burke, Pegasus Descending

“I wished life consisted of just taking care of animals, the earth, and one’s family and friends. In fact, that’s what it should be. But it’s not, and the explanation for that fact is not one I have ever been able to provide.”
― James Lee Burke, Pegasus Descending

“This man is evil and I wish you hadn’t gone after him on your own. But stop judging yourself so harshly. You were protecting a creature who can’t protect himself. You don’t think God can understand that?” I’m not a theologian, but I believe absolution can be granted to us in many forms. Perhaps it can come in the ends of a woman’s fingers on your skin. Some people call it the redemptive power of love. Anyway, why argue with it when it comes your way?”
― James Lee Burke, Pegasus Descending

“But the succubus I had tried to exorcise by marrying a woman of peace still held title to my soul. I saw the room distort and the faces of the people around me turn into Grecian masks, and I heard a sound in my ears like the steel tracks of armored vehicles wending their way across an unforgiving land. I heard people screaming and I did not know if their voices were from my sleep or if my own deeds had transformed me into an object of horror and pity in the eyes of my fellow man.”
― James Lee Burke, Pegasus Descending

“When he got outside, his eyes were brimming with tears. He washed his face in an aluminum basin and blew his nose on his handkerchief, then returned to the yellow building, a grin on his face. The personnel at the home were Mennonites and Catholic lay missionaries, and seemed to glow with a level of humanity that Clete thought had little to do with political or perhaps even religious conviction. In fact, they seemed to be uncomplicated people who had little or no interest in the larger world and did not view themselves as exceptional and would probably not understand why anyone would treat them as such.”
― James Lee Burke, Pegasus Descending

“I’D HAD A SLIP from my A.A. program the previous year. The causes aren’t important now, but the consequence was the worst bender I ever went on—a two-day blackout that left me on the edges of delirium tremens and with the very real conviction I had committed a homicide. The damage I did to myself was of the kind that alcoholics sometimes do not recover from—the kind when you burn the cables on your elevator and punch a hole in the basement and keep right on going. But I went back to meetings and pumped iron and ran in the park, and relearned one of the basic tenets of A.A.—that there is no possession more valuable than a sober sunrise, and any drunk who demands more out of life than that will probably not have it. Unfortunately the nocturnal hours were never good to me. In my dreams I would be drunk again, loathsome even unto myself, a public spectacle whom people treated with either pity or contempt. I would wake from the dream, my throat parched, and walk off balance into the kitchen for a glass of water, unable to extract myself from memories about people and places that I had thought no longer belonged to my life. But the feelings released from my unconscious by the dream would not leave me. It’s like blood splatter on the soul. You”
― James Lee Burke, Pegasus Descending

“He had learned in Vietnam there were three groups of people who got you killed—pencil pushers, amateurs, and idealists.”
― James Lee Burke, Pegasus Descending

“Nobody ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”
― James Lee Burke, Pegasus Descending

“believe long ago had decided it was better to be first in Gaul rather than second in Rome.”
― James Lee Burke, Pegasus Descending

“But as William Faulkner said, and as I was about to learn, the past is not only still with us, the past is not even the past. The warning call from Wally,”
― James Lee Burke, Pegasus Descending

“one of the basic tenets of A.A.—that there is no possession more valuable than a sober sunrise, and any drunk who demands more out of life than that will probably”
― James Lee Burke, Pegasus Descending

“There may be room in government service for the altruist and the iconoclast, but I have yet to see one who was not treated as an oddity at best and at worst an object of suspicion and fear.”
― James Lee Burke, Pegasus Descending