Wayfaring Stranger Quotes

“The wrong people always worry. The people who are the real problem never worry about anything.”
― James Lee Burke, Wayfaring Stranger

“You’ve got another problem. Like most white trash, you’re disrespectful to your betters and proud of your stupidity and ignorance.”
― James Lee Burke, Wayfaring Stranger

“As I was to learn, patience and latitude and even humility are, paradoxically, the handmaidens of wealth, because virtue is costly only for those who own nothing else.”
― James Lee Burke, Wayfaring Stranger

“There's another way to put it. Sometimes your luck runs out and you have to accept that the life you planned was a dream written on water.”
― James Lee Burke, Wayfaring Stranger

“Sometimes your luck runs out and you have to accept that the life you planned was a dream written on water.”
― James Lee Burke, Wayfaring Stranger

“Cancer and lightning go where they want. So does political corruption.”
― James Lee Burke, Wayfaring Stranger

“There are certain kinds of currency you acquire in life. Most of it is ephemeral. But friendship and faith in the unseen world and the commitment to be true unto thine own self are the human glue that you never give up, not for any reason.”
― James Lee Burke, Wayfaring Stranger

“It was the poem that explained the nature of courage and turned the mystery of death into a heroic couplet. Ultimately, it was the poem that banished fear from the heart and transformed us from actors into participants.”
― James Lee Burke, Wayfaring Stranger

“He had been humiliated and treated like the white trash he was. Under the bedsheet that hides the identity of every Ku Klux Klansman is a cretinous, vicious, and childlike human being whose last holdout is his whites-only restroom.”
― James Lee Burke, Wayfaring Stranger

“There are those who are made different in the womb.”
― James Lee Burke, Wayfaring Stranger

“profligacy”
― James Lee Burke, Wayfaring Stranger

“Deviants and monsters ran the camps where families were sent up the chimney or turned into bars of soap, but they would have been powerless without the clerks who sat anonymously behind typewriters and gave them bureaucratic legitimacy.”
― James Lee Burke, Wayfaring Stranger

“of the story showed the four brain-destroyed women Linda Gail had shown me. The grainy transfer of the images to newsprint had made them even more macabre. The story had come off the wire in Los Angeles and was written by a gossip columnist who quoted other gossip columnists as the story’s source. The details were bizarre and prurient and unbelievable, in the way of stories from True Detective, Argosy, Saga, and Male, and because they were so unbelievable, the reader concluded they could not have been manufactured. I saw Roy’s name and Linda Gail’s and the director Jerry Fallon’s and Clara Wiseheart’s. The story was basically accurate; the prose was another matter. It was purple, full of erotic suggestion, cutesy about “love nests” and “romance in Mayheco.” But as tabloid reporting often does for no purpose other than to satisfy a lascivious readership, the article brought to light an injustice and criminal conspiracy that mainstream newspaper and radio would not have touched. In other words, the account was less one of fact than a hazy description of infidelity, a movie set that had turned into the Baths of Caracalla, a young starlet seduced by”
― James Lee Burke, Wayfaring Stranger

“It's fair to say that mortality takes many manifestations, but so does the indomitable nature of the human spirit, and it does so in ways that are sometimes hardly noticeable.”
― James Lee Burke, Wayfaring Stranger

“Who can make sense of the roles we play? If I could draw any conclusion about the long, depressing slog of human progress, it’s the possibility that unseen elements lie just on the other side of the physical universe and that somehow we’re actors on the stage of the Globe, right across the Thames from a place called Pissing Alley, whether William Shakespeare or Christopher Marlowe are aware of our presence or not.”
― James Lee Burke, Wayfaring Stranger

“The Homeric Epic does not have to be discovered inside a book; it begins just west of Fort Worth and extends all the way to Santa Monica.”
― James Lee Burke, Wayfaring Stranger

“He is pathologically incapable of change this side of the grave.”
― James Lee Burke, Wayfaring Stranger

“I didn’t intend to hurt her. But when you deal with those who have chosen to inflict great harm on themselves and their loved ones on a daily basis, whatever you say to them about the reality of their lives will either prove inadequate or offend them deeply, and leave you with feelings of guilt and depression. It’s not unlike walking through cobweb.”
― James Lee Burke, Wayfaring Stranger

“If you get your ticket ripped in half, you do it in hot blood, and you do not go gently into that good night.”
― James Lee Burke, Wayfaring Stranger

“When people make mistakes, there’s usually a reason for it. These pork chops are something else.” She knew at that moment that Hershel Pine was probably the best human being she’d ever known.”
― James Lee Burke, Wayfaring Stranger

“speculation on the nature of creation is a luxury reserved for scholars. The rest of us have to deal with one another and ferret our way through the snares and pitfalls that we create for our fellow man.”
― James Lee Burke, Wayfaring Stranger

“I hope you enjoy Wayfaring Stranger. It’s the best book and the most biographical one I have written.”
― James Lee Burke, Wayfaring Stranger

“Roland”
― James Lee Burke, Wayfaring Stranger

“Who can make sense of the roles we play? If I could draw any conclusion about the long, depressing slog of human progress, it’s the possibility that unseen elements lie just on the other side of the physical universe and that somehow we’re actors on the stage of the Globe, right across the Thames from a place called Pissing Alley, whether William Shakespeare or Christopher Marlowe are”
― James Lee Burke, Wayfaring Stranger

“Maybe he would come back one day. Or maybe not. Back then, people had a way of walking down a tar road and crossing through a pool of heat and disappearing forever.”
― James Lee Burke, Wayfaring Stranger

“We’re wayfaring strangers. We’re born alone, we die alone.”
― James Lee Burke, Wayfaring Stranger

“Wicked men do not go away of their own accord.”
― James Lee Burke, Wayfaring Stranger

“Straight shooters always win”
― James Lee Burke, Wayfaring Stranger

“I’ve killed men against whom I had no grievance.”
― James Lee Burke, Wayfaring Stranger

“Don’t borrow trouble.”
― James Lee Burke, Wayfaring Stranger