The New Iberia Blues Quotes

“Baptized Christians ran the ovens in the camps.”
― James Lee Burke, The New Iberia Blues

“For good or bad, my preoccupation with death and the past had defined much of my life, and a long time ago I had made my separate peace with the world and abandoned any claim on reason or normalcy or the golden mean. Waylon Jennings said it many years ago: I’ve always been crazy but it’s kept me from going insane.”
― James Lee Burke, The New Iberia Blues

“No matter how you cut it, I was back to the short form of the Serenity Prayer, known in AA and other recovery groups as Fuck It.”
― James Lee Burke, The New Iberia Blues

“go with the wind, all of us twirling among young people who wore flowers in their hair, a church bell clanging without stop in a Spanish mission. Roll on forever, Woody.”
― James Lee Burke, The New Iberia Blues

“if you haven’t noticed, the United States government is the biggest weapons manufacturer in the world.”
― James Lee Burke, The New Iberia Blues

“Bienvenu, mon raton laveur et votre tee amis, aussi.”
― James Lee Burke, The New Iberia Blues

“People are what they do, not what they say, not what they think, not what they pretend to be.”
― James Lee Burke, The New Iberia Blues

“We had little money but didn’t think of ourselves as poor. Our vision, if I can call it that, was not materialistic. If we had a concept about ourselves, it was egalitarian, although we would not have known what that word meant. We spoke French entirely. There was a bond between Cajuns and people of color. Cajuns didn’t travel, because they believed they lived in the best place on earth. But somehow the worst in us, or outside of us, asserted itself and prevailed and replaced everything that was good in our lives. We traded away our language, our customs, our stands of cypress, our sugarcane acreage, our identity, and our pride. Outsiders ridiculed us and thought us stupid; teachers forbade our children to speak French on the school grounds. Our barrier islands were dredged to extinction. Our coastline was cut with eight thousand miles of industrial channels, destroying the root systems of the sawgrass and the swamps. The bottom of the state continues to wash away in the flume of the Mississippi at a rate of sixteen square miles a year. Much of this we did to ourselves in the same way that a drunk like me will destroy a gift, one that is irreplaceable and extended by a divine hand. Our roadsides are littered with trash, our rain ditches layered with it, our waterways dumping grounds for automobile tires and couches and building material. While we trivialize the implications of our drive-through daiquiri windows and the seediness of our politicians and recite our self-congratulatory mantra, laissez les bons temps rouler, the southern rim of the state hovers on the edge of oblivion, a diminishing, heartbreaking strip of green lace that eventually will be available only in photographs.”
― James Lee Burke, The New Iberia Blues

“As with all megalomaniacs, he had no handles. He was the type of man the Spanish call sin dios, sin verguenza, without God or shame.”
― James Lee Burke, The New Iberia Blues

“I knew I had entered a new season in my life, one that had nothing to do with rotations of the earth. It’s the season when you accept your fate and give up fear and worry and end your lover’s quarrel with the world and follow the foot tracks of hominids into a place that is perhaps already at the tips of your fingers. When that happens to you, you’ll know it, and if you’re wise, you will not try to explain it to others, any more than you would try to explain light to a man born without sight.”
― James Lee Burke, The New Iberia Blues

“I had no plan in mind. However, that statement is one I have always distrusted in other people, and I distrust it even more when I think it or say it myself. The unconscious always knows what the person is doing or planning. The agenda is to find the situation and the rationale that will allow the individual to commit deeds that are unconscionable. No matter how you cut it, I was back to the short form of the Serenity Prayer, known in AA and other recovery groups as Fuck It.”
― James Lee Burke, The New Iberia Blues

“That postage stamp of a moment has always remained with me as a reminder of the innocent world in which I grew up. Or at least the innocent world in which we chose to live, perhaps to our regret. When I sat under the tree at three in the morning, an old man watching a barge and tug working its way upstream, I knew that I no longer had to reclaim the past, that the past was still with me, inextricably part of my soul and who I was; I could step through a hole in the dimension and be with my father and mother again, and I didn’t have to drink or mourn the dead or live on a cross for my misdeeds; I was set free, and the past and the future and the present were at the ends of my fingertips, filled with promise and goodness, and I didn’t have to submit to time or fate or even mortality. The party is a grand one and infinite in nature and like the music of the spheres thunderous in its presence, and I realized finally that the invitation to it comes with the sunrise and a clear eye and a good heart and the knowledge that we’re already inside eternity and need not fear any longer.”
― James Lee Burke, The New Iberia Blues

“I could have written the entire incident off, but any time three people report a scream, they’re calling not about a sound but about a memory that lives in the collective unconscious, one that goes back to the cave. When we are alarmed to the degree that we have to tell others about it, we’re dipping into a primal knowledge about the darker potential of the gene pool. Or at least this has always been my belief.”
― James Lee Burke, The New Iberia Blues

“the men who break in and steal by night, who spread self-doubt and fear and acrimony, will eventually fall by the wayside and be unremembered ciphers that disappear like scraps of newspaper in our rearview mirror.”
― James Lee Burke, The New Iberia Blues

“a circuitous way of spreading confusion without offering any information of value.”
― James Lee Burke, The New Iberia Blues

“Did you ever see a mob rush across town to do a good deed?”
― James Lee Burke, The New Iberia Blues

“There is a subculture in this country that seems to have no antecedent—a conflation of reality television, National Enquirer journalism, fundamentalist religion, militarism, and professional football. At the center is an adoration of celebrity, no matter how it is acquired or in what form it comes. Women”
― James Lee Burke, The New Iberia Blues

“If we get scared enough we can convince ourselves that snake and nape are selective, and that a scarlet cross painted on a shield can make acceptable the beheadings of Saracens on a scaffold in Jerusalem.”
― James Lee Burke, The New Iberia Blues

“Evil has an odor. It’s a presence that consumes its host. We deny it because we don’t have an acceptable explanation for it. It smells like decay inside living tissue.”
― James Lee Burke, The New Iberia Blues

“In Montana I knew a twenty-one-year-old kid who killed two people before he got to prison, then killed or helped kill five more during a riot. He had to be awakened from a sound sleep the afternoon of his execution. The”
― James Lee Burke, The New Iberia Blues

“and made famous by Janis Joplin. It was one of despair and loss and unrelieved misery, one that maybe only a black woman of Thornton’s era could adequately understand. The song was “Ball and Chain.”
― James Lee Burke, The New Iberia Blues

“how many decisions did you make that at the time seemed inconsequential but down the track had enormous influence on either you or others?”
― James Lee Burke, The New Iberia Blues

“Joe Molinari’s role in life had been being used by others, as consumer and laborer and voter and minion, which, in the economics of the world I grew up in, was considered normal by both the liege lord in the manor and the serf in the field.”
― James Lee Burke, The New Iberia Blues

“Women are the perfect creation. I don’t care who hears that. Even before I hit puberty, they lived nightly in my dreams, and I have the feeling they’ll live with me in the grave.”
― James Lee Burke, The New Iberia Blues

“each morning is a blessing, as votive in nature as a communion wafer raised to the sky.”
― James Lee Burke, The New Iberia Blues

“Those are props from a film we made about a serial killer.” He gave me the title and named the actors and the directors. My head was throbbing. I couldn’t process”
― James Lee Burke, The New Iberia Blues

“According to legend, he had worn elegant clothes and spoken Parisian French and had his land and wealth stolen from him by carpetbaggers after the war.”
― James Lee Burke, The New Iberia Blues

“eyes like light trapped in sherry,”
― James Lee Burke, The New Iberia Blues

“The Great Whore of Babylon is a commanding mistress. Once she widens her thighs and takes you inside her, she never lets go.”
― James Lee Burke, The New Iberia Blues

“what do you say to people who are doing their best when their best is not enough?”
― James Lee Burke, The New Iberia Blues