Robicheaux Quotes

“Mortality is not kind, and do not let anyone tell you it is. If there is such a thing as wisdom, and I have serious doubts about its presence in my own life, it lies in the acceptance of the human condition and perhaps the knowledge that those who have passed on are still with us, out there in the mist, showing us the way, sometimes uttering a word of caution from the shadows, sometimes visiting us in our sleep, as bright as a candle burning inside a basement that has no windows.”
― James Lee Burke, Robicheaux

“Coincidence is your Higher Power acting with anonymity.”
― James Lee Burke, Robicheaux

“How do you handle it when your anger brims over the edge of the pot? You use the shortened version of the Serenity Prayer, which is “Fuck it.” Like Voltaire’s Candide tending his own garden or the British infantry going up the Khyber Pass one bloody foot at a time, you do your job, and you grin and walk through the cannon smoke, and you just keep saying fuck it. You also have faith in your own convictions and never let the naysayers and those who are masters at inculcating self-doubt hold sway in your life. “Fuck it” is not profanity. “Fuck it” is a sonnet.”
― James Lee Burke, Robicheaux

“If you have attended the dying, you know what their last moments are like. They anticipate the separation of themselves from the world of the living before you do, and they accept it with dignity and without complaint”
― James Lee Burke, Robicheaux

“If anyone tells you he’s from New Orleans and doesn’t drink, he’s probably not from New Orleans. Louisiana is not a state; it’s an outdoor mental asylum in which millions of people stay bombed most of their lives. That’s not an exaggeration. Cirrhosis is a family heirloom.”
― James Lee Burke, Robicheaux

“the only argument you ever win is the one you don’t have.”
― James Lee Burke, Robicheaux

“The human spirit is frail. People believe whatever they need to believe. I feel sorry for all of them.”
― James Lee Burke, Robicheaux

“If you have dealt with liars, even pathological ones who pass polygraph tests, you know the signs to look for. The liar blinks just before the end of the lie, or he keeps his eyelids stitched to his brow. He folds his arms on his chest, subconsciously concealing his deception. The voice becomes warm, a bit saccharine; sometimes there's an ethereal glow in the face. He repeats his statements unnecessarily and peppers his speech with adverbs and hyperbole. The first-person pronouns 'I,' 'me,' 'mine,' and 'myself' dominate his rhetoric.
Conversely, the truth teller is laconic and seems bored with the discussion, not caring whether you get it right or not.”
― James Lee Burke, Robicheaux

“I wanted to believe he was mad. Unfortunately, I no longer knew what madness was.”
― James Lee Burke, Robicheaux

“I never talked about Molly's death unless I had to, not even at the grave. I don't believe that the acceptance of mortality is a situation you resolve by talking to others. The same with personal grief and mourning or loss of any kind. I remember the words of a black ex-junkie musician friend of mine who got clean in a lockdown unit where he beat his head to pulp against a steel wall: 'You deal wit' your own snakes or you don't, man. Sometimes you're the only cat in the cathedral. Ain't nobody else can do it for you.”
― James Lee Burke, Robicheaux

“...but there are certain truths you keep inside you and do not defend lest you cheapen and then lose them altogether. Those truths have less to do with the dead than the awareness that we are no different from them, and there is no afterlife but only one life, a continuum in which all time occurs at once, like a dream inside the mind of God.”
― James Lee Burke, Robicheaux

“Like an early nineteenth-century poet, when I have melancholy moments and feel the world is too much for us and that late and soon we lay waste to our powers in getting and spending, I'm forced to pause and reflect on my experiences with the dead and the power they exert on our lives.
This may seem a macabre perspective on one's life, but at a certain point it seems to be the only one we have. Mortality is not kind, and do not let anyone tell you it is. If there is such a thing as wisdom, and I have serious doubts about its presence in my own life, it lies in the acceptance of the human condition and perhaps the knowledge that those who have passed on are still with us, out there in the mist, showing us the way, sometimes uttering a word of caution from the shadows, sometimes visiting us in our sleep, as bright as a candle burning inside a basement that has no windows.”
― James Lee Burke, Robicheaux

“If YOU'RE a real drunkard, you don't need alcohol to mess up your life. A real drunkard knows his saloon is available inside his head twenty-four hours a day, and he can light up his viscera and give free rein to the gargoyles in the basement and access the whole drunkard's menu- alcoholic psychosis, unprotected sex, messing with guns and knives and dangerous people, all of it as fast as you can snap the cap on a bottle of brew. Or let me use another metaphor. You simply turn yourself into a human pinball, bouncing pell-mell off the flippers and crashing into the bumpers while electrified thunder roars and bells jingle and jangle and all the colors of the rainbow flash in celebration of your self-destruction.”
― James Lee Burke, Robicheaux

“Individuals don’t change history. History finds the individual. John Steinbeck said that.”
― James Lee Burke, Robicheaux

“It’s politics. This is Louisiana.” “I remember many situations when I said it was just Vietnam.” Jimmy pulled the cork from a green half-empty bottle of wine. “Here’s to neocolonialism everywhere.” I wasn’t up to his cynicism. I looked at the oaks, the moss lifting in the wind, purple dust rising from a cane field, Bayou Teche glinting in the sun like a Byzantine shield. La Louisiane, the love of my life, the home of Jolie Blon and Evangeline and the Great Whore of Babylon, the place for which I would die, the place for which there was no answer or cure.”
― James Lee Burke, Robicheaux

“A woman opened the back door. She wore a black suit and hose; her hair was black, too, pulled straight back, her skin the color of paste, her eyes dark and luminous, as though she had a fever. “I’m Emmeline.”
― James Lee Burke, Robicheaux

“You know what they say at [Alcoholics Anonymous] meetings. Coincidence is your Higher Power acting with anonymity.'
'I didn't know you were in the program.'
'I'm not. I go for the dialogue. It's great material.”
― James Lee Burke, Robicheaux

“I believed Jimmy had an enormous capacity for either good or evil, and that his spirit was as capricious as a wind vane. F. Scott Fitzgerald once said no one could understand America without understanding the graves of Shiloh. I think the same could have been said of Jimmy Nightingale.”
― James Lee Burke, Robicheaux

“never let the naysayers and those who are masters at inculcating self-doubt hold sway in your life.”
― James Lee Burke, Robicheaux

“IN MY OPINION, one of the great follies in the world is to put yourself inside the head of dysfunctional people. The mistake we usually make is to assume there is a rationale for their behavior. In most cases, there is none.”
― James Lee Burke, Robicheaux

“politicians were liars who served the interests of corporations, that populists were con artists, and that the poor were kept poor and uneducated as long as possible.”
― James Lee Burke, Robicheaux

“Solitude and peace with oneself are probably the only preparation one has for death.”
― James Lee Burke, Robicheaux

“Louisiana is not a state; it’s an outdoor mental asylum in which millions of people stay bombed most of their lives.”
― James Lee Burke, Robicheaux

“PEOPLE ARE WHAT they do, not what they think, not what they say.”
― James Lee Burke, Robicheaux

“She was one of those women who seemed to choose solitude and plainness over beauty, and anger over happiness.”
― James Lee Burke, Robicheaux

“These thoughts robbed the light from my eyes,”
― James Lee Burke, Robicheaux

“Emmeline seemed to lie the way all narcissists do. Whatever they say, regardless of its absurdity, becomes the truth.”
― James Lee Burke, Robicheaux

“Louisiana is not a state; it’s an outdoor mental asylum in which millions of people stay bombed most of their lives. That’s not an exaggeration. Cirrhosis is a family heirloom.”
― James Lee Burke, Robicheaux

“I could see the uncertainty, the fear about her job, her paycheck, her relationship with her boss, the prospect of offending people with power and authority over others, the dark figure sitting in the shadows at the end of the bar when it’s closing time. I wondered how many people would understand her frame of reference.”
― James Lee Burke, Robicheaux

“crowd again. “I think we blew an opportunity. But maybe”
― James Lee Burke, Robicheaux