The Jealous Kind Quotes

“Then she walked away, like Helen of Troy turning her back on Attica. A gust of warm wind blew newspapers along the boulevard into the sky. The light was orange and bleeding out of the clouds in the west, the horizon darkening, the waves crashing on the beach just the other side of Seawall Boulevard, the palm trees rattling dryly in the wind. I could smell the salt and the seaweed and the tiny shellfish that had dried on the beach, like the smell of birth. I”
― James Lee Burke, The Jealous Kind

“The juke and barbecue joints were loud, the doors wide open, the elevated sidewalks inset with tethering rings and littered with paper cups and beer cans, rust-stained where the rain spouts bled across the concrete. ~ James Lee Burke,”
― James Lee Burke, The Jealous Kind

“What’s an ideologue?” “Someone who brings religious passion to a political abstraction only cretins could think up,” he said. “When you meet one, flee his presence at all costs. He’ll incinerate half the planet to save the other”
― James Lee Burke, The Jealous Kind

“You’ve got a lot of anger in you, son,” he said. “Don’t let it turn on you. It’ll flat tear you up.”
― James Lee Burke, The Jealous Kind

“was learning that when you get close to death, you’ll trade everything you own for one more day on earth.”
― James Lee Burke, The Jealous Kind

“If you grow up in an alcoholic home, you learn a lesson that never leaves you: The need to satisfy the addiction comes first; everything else is secondary. Daily betrayal becomes a way of life. We”
― James Lee Burke, The Jealous Kind

“IN THE DARWINIAN world of American high school culture, I had learned only one lesson: The lights of love and pity often died early, and many friendships were based on necessity and emotional dependency and nothing else.”
― James Lee Burke, The Jealous Kind

“No one had to convince me about the reality of hell. It wasn’t a fiery pit. It lived and thrived in the human breast and consumed its host from night to morning.”
― James Lee Burke, The Jealous Kind

“There is a certain kind of love that's forever. It's not marked by a marital vow, or social custom, or gender identity, or the age of the parties involved. It's a love that doesn't even need to be declared. Its presence in your life is as factual as the sun rising in the morning. You do not argue in its defense or try to explain or justify it to others. The other part mixes into your heart and remains with you the rest of your days. The bond is never broken, any more than you can separate yourself from your body or soul.
[we} became one person, unable to enjoy pleasure without the presence of the other. The changes in our lives, the geographical separations, the pull of the earth on our bodies, none of these things ever affected the contract and bond that took place in our youth; over the years neither of us ever suffered a tragedy or bore a burden or celebrated a success without the involvement of the other. I could not draw breath without feeling that [he] was at my side.”
― James Lee Burke, The Jealous Kind

“Mr. Epstein is a cradle-to-the-grave ideologue. A leftist but nonetheless an ideologue.” “What’s an ideologue?” “Someone who brings religious passion to a political abstraction only cretins could think up,” he said. “When you meet one, flee his presence at all costs. He’ll incinerate half the planet to save the other half and never understand his own motivations.” “What are his motivations?” “Control, power, penis envy, addiction to breast-feeding, the fact that most of them are born ugly, God only knows. In one night, ten men like Mr.”
― James Lee Burke, The Jealous Kind

“The clouds were as yellow as sulfur and roiling in thick curds all the way to the horizon, as though we were trapped beneath an ocean that was sliding over the edges of the earth.”
― James Lee Burke, The Jealous Kind

“As a young person on the edge of discovering the world and shaking away the scales of your youth, did you ever have a day when you knew that for the rest of your life, you would be grateful that your father was your father and your mother was your mother, no matter how flawed they might be?”
― James Lee Burke, The Jealous Kind

“What’s an ideologue?” “Someone who brings religious passion to a political abstraction only cretins could think up,” he said. “When you meet one, flee his presence at all costs. He’ll incinerate half the planet to save the other half and never understand his own motivations.”
― James Lee Burke, The Jealous Kind

“I COULD SEE MY mother slipping away by the day, maybe even the hour, convinced that her public humiliation of Mr. Krauser had caused his suicide. The western sky could be strung with evening clouds that looked like flamingo wings; rain might patter on her caladiums and hibiscus and hydrangeas and roses and fill the air with a smell out of The Arabian Nights, the book that probably saved her sanity as a child. But no matter how grand a place the world might be, my mother’s eyes had the hollow expression of someone staring into a crypt.”
― James Lee Burke, The Jealous Kind

“The sky was black, creaking with electricity, like someone crumpling cellophane.”
― James Lee Burke, The Jealous Kind