Burning Angel Quotes

“St. Paul said there might be angels living among us, so we should be careful how we treat one another.”
― James Lee Burke, Burning Angel

“I’ve often subscribed to the notion that perhaps history is not sequential; that all people, from all of history, live out their lives simultaneously, in different dimensions perhaps, occupying the same pieces of geography, unseen by one another, as if we are all part of one spiritual conception.”
― James Lee Burke, Burning Angel

“Cookie and the Cupcakes, Lloyd Price, Warren Storm. They used to play around here.”
― James Lee Burke, Burning Angel

“the fifties would remember those songs: “Big Blue Diamond,” “Shirley Jean,” “Lawdy Miss Clawdy,” “I Need Somebody Bad Tonight,” “Mathilda,” “Betty and Dupree,” and “I Got the Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie”
― James Lee Burke, Burning Angel

“When a drunk gets eighty-sixed out of a bar, he’s not supposed to buy drinks for the people still inside.”
― James Lee Burke, Burning Angel

“I’m not telling the troot, no?”
― James Lee Burke, Burning Angel

“recidivists licensed bondsmen wouldn’t pick up by the ears with Q-Tips,”
― James Lee Burke, Burning Angel

“inextricable”
― James Lee Burke, Burning Angel

“This piece of land was our original sin, except we had found no baptismal rite to expunge it from our lives.”
― James Lee Burke, Burning Angel

“This piece of land was our original sin, except we had found no baptismal rite to expunge it from our lives. That green-purple field of new cane was rooted in rib cage and eye socket. But what of the others whose lives had begun here and ended in other places? The ones who became prostitutes in cribs on Hopkins Street in New Iberia and Jane’s Alley in New Orleans, sliced their hands open with oyster knives, laid bare their shin bones with the cane sickle, learned the twelve-string blues on the Red Hat gang and in the camps at Angola with Leadbelly and Hogman Matthew Maxey, were virtually cooked alive in the castiron sweatboxes of Camp A, and rode Jim Crow trains North, as in a biblical exodus, to southside Chicago and the magic of 1925 Harlem, where they filled the air with the music of the South and the smell of cornbread and greens and pork chops fixed in sweet potatoes, as though they were still willing to forgive if we would only acknowledge their capacity for forgiveness. Tolstoy asked how much land did a man need. Just enough to let him feel the pull of the earth on his ankles and the claim it lays on the quick as well as the dead.”
― James Lee Burke, Burning Angel