Swan Peak Quotes

“How do you explain to yourself the casual manner in which you threw your life away?”
― James Lee Burke, Swan Peak

“Why do I always feel like you're trying to staple my umbilical cord to the corner of your desk?”
― James Lee Burke, Swan Peak

“I used to know a carnival man turned preacher who said the key to his success was understanding the people of what he called Snake's Navel, Arkansas. He said in Snake's Navel, the biggest thing going on Saturday night was the Dairy Queen. He said you could get the people there to do damn near anything --pollute their own water, work at five-dollar-an-hour jobs, drive fifty miles to a health clinic-- as long as you packaged it right. That meant you gave them a light show and faith healings and blow-down-the-walls gospel music with a whole row of American flags across the stage. He said what they liked best, though --what really got them to pissing all over themselves-- was to be told it was other people going to hell and not them. He said people in Snake's Navel wasn't real fond of homosexuals and Arabs and Hollywood Jews, although he didn't use them kinds of terms in his sermons.”
― James Lee Burke, Swan Peak

“You just heard the story. That’s the story. That’s what history is, right? History is the story that survives.”
― James Lee Burke, Swan Peak

“I will be where I am.”
― James Lee Burke, Swan Peak

“The devil was more real than God, and”
― James Lee Burke, Swan Peak

“that the chief symptoms of alcoholism were guilt about the past and anxiety about the future,”
― James Lee Burke, Swan Peak

“I wasn't interested in trying to explain how the measure of one's life finally reduces itself to the possession of the moment, then the moment after that, moving through each of them in sequence from day to day, letting go of yesterday and asking nothing from the future except to be there for it.”
― James Lee Burke, Swan Peak

“The great joke is that any wisdom most of us acquire can seldom be passed on to others. I suspect this reality is at the heart of most old people’s anger.”
― James Lee Burke, Swan Peak

“Life’s a sonofabitch, then you die.”
― James Lee Burke, Swan Peak

“The wind becomes your indispensable ally. When the trees and undergrowth and sometimes the elephant grass begin to thrash, the object that does not move or the shadow that remains like a tin cutout becomes the entity that is out there in the darkness, preparing to take your life. Except in this case, the presence on”
― James Lee Burke, Swan Peak

“You make me resent myself, Troyce. That’s the worst thing somebody can do to somebody else.” He looked at”
― James Lee Burke, Swan Peak