Light of the World Quotes

“Age is a clever thief. It takes a little from you each day, so you're not aware of your loss until it's irreversible.”
― James Lee Burke, Light of the World

“If I've learned anything at all from my years, it's the simple lesson that human beings are always more complicated, brave, long-suffering, and, ultimately, heroic than we ever guessed, and that none of us completely understands another, no matter how intimate we are with them.”
― James Lee Burke, Light of the World

“The photographs of the inmates at Bergen-Belsen or Andersonville Prison or the bodies in the ditch at My Lai disturb us in a singular fashion because those instances of egregious human cruelty were committed for the most part by baptized Christians.”
― James Lee Burke, Light of the World

“THE ALLURE OF Montana is like a commitment to a narcotic; you can never use it up or get enough of it. Its wilderness areas probably resemble the earth on the first day of creation.”
― James Lee Burke, Light of the World

“At a certain age, you realize the greatest loss you can experience is a theft you perpetrate upon yourself—the waste of days given us. Is there any more piercing remorse than the realization that a person has thrown away the potential that resides in every sunrise?”
― James Lee Burke, Light of the World

“I guess that seems like an absurd premise until we consider the possibility that the dead are always with us, beckoning from the shade, reminding us that we’re actors in the same drama they have already lived and that they can help us with our lives if we will only let them.”
― James Lee Burke, Light of the World

“Through the screen, he could smell the evening as though it were a living presence, the purple and yellow flowers in his yard and the dark green wetness of the fescue part of a song that was never supposed to die. Except he could feel things ending, coming apart at the center, and he didn’t know why.”
― James Lee Burke, Light of the World

“soldiers who return from foreign battlefields with a syndrome that survivors of the Great War called the thousand-yard stare.”
― James Lee Burke, Light of the World

“If you're wired a certain way, you'll always be in morion, clicking to your own rhythm, all of it in four-four time, avoiding convention and predictability and control as you would a sickness, the whole world waiting for you like an enormous dance pavilion lit by colored lights and surrounded with palm trees. I'm not talking about the dirty boogie. The music of the spheres is right outside your bedroom window.”
― James Lee Burke, Light of the World

“WHY DO PEOPLE in A.A. claim they pay the biggest membership dues in the world? That’s easy. Early in life, you set out to deconstruct everything good you thought you’d turn out to be. When you’re finished doing that, you foul your blood, piss your brains into the street, trade off your tomorrows, destroy your family, betray your friends, court suicide on a daily basis, and become an object of ridicule and contempt in the eyes of your fellow man. That’s for openers. The rest of the dance card involves detox, jail, padded cells, and finally, the cemetery. If you want your soul shot out of a cannon, or you want to enter a period of agitated depression and psychoneurotic anxiety known as a Gethsemane Experience, untreated alcoholism is a surefire way to get there. The big surprise at your first A.A. meeting is the apparent normalcy of the people in the room. They come from every socioeconomic background imaginable. The only thing most of them have in common is the neurosis that has governed their lives.”
― James Lee Burke, Light of the World

“IF YOU ARE a parent, you know the following to be true: Even though your child has grown into adulthood, you never see the man or the woman; you see only the little boy or the little girl.”
― James Lee Burke, Light of the World

“At some point in your life, you have to give up anger or it will destroy your spirit the way cancer destroys living tissue.”
― James Lee Burke, Light of the World

“I would start with four fingers of Jack in a thick mug, with a sweating Budweiser back, and by midnight I would be alone at the end of the bar, armed, drunk, and hunched over my glass, morally and psychologically insane.”
― James Lee Burke , Light of the World

“The armies of the night are faceless and mindless and the modern equivalent of Visigoths, but when they have a leader, their time in history rolls around again.”
― James Lee Burke, Light of the World

“All our dreams and hopes become as naught, and evil men are allowed to hang their lanterns on our tombstones. What greater folly is there?”
― James Lee Burke, Light of the World

“A tanker truck appeared far down the wavy surface of the highway, headlights on, its weight and shimmering cylindrical shape and dedicated purpose so great and unrelenting that it seemed to move and jitter against the sun’s afterglow without sound or mechanically driven power, sustained by its own momentum, as though the truck had a destiny that had been planned long ago.”
― James Lee Burke, Light of the World