Cemetery Road Quotes

“When a parent dies, your center of gravity is altered. Even if you lived apart from them—even if you walled yourself off from all contact—you are irrevocably lessened by their passing. Death, like gravity, respects no barriers.”
― Greg Iles, Cemetery Road

“There’s no universal tally of good and evil, balancing right and wrong. The Christians with their God-has-a-plan fantasy, the Hindus with their karmic balance . . . it’s all wishful thinking. Primitive religious impulse. Linus’s damned security blanket.”
― Greg Iles, Cemetery Road

“There’s no meaning to be found in tragedy. Only in our response to it.”
― Greg Iles, Cemetery Road

“Things always come back into balance, though, right? Eventually.” Dad goes very still, eerily so considering his disease. “Eventually. Balance came back in 1918 after twenty million deaths. It came back in 1945 after seventy million. It’s getting the pendulum back to the midpoint that’s the killer. And right now it’s being pushed hard right, all around the world. The last gasp of Ozymandias—once more, with feeling.”
― Greg Iles, Cemetery Road

“We’re witnessing the last gasp of white America, and it’s a lulu. Our people think the land of liberty’s their God-given country club and the caddies have forgotten their place. But revolution’s coming . . . just not the one they think.”
― Greg Iles, Cemetery Road

“came across a letter by T. S. Eliot, who I had always vaguely assumed was English. To my surprise, I discovered that Eliot had grown up along the same river I had, in St. Louis, and to a friend he wrote this about the Mississippi: I feel that there is something in having passed one’s childhood beside the big river, which is incommunicable to those who have not. I consider myself fortunate to have been born here, rather than in Boston, or New York, or London. I knew exactly what Eliot meant.”
― Greg Iles, Cemetery Road

“Marrying someone you don’t love is a sin. Because it sends both of you to hell. It destroys the other person first, but in the end it gets you, too. The magnitude of what you’ve done, the damage you’ve caused by forcing you both to live a lie.”
― Greg Iles, Cemetery Road

“Southern women don’t show their pain to anybody. They aren’t raised that way. But they feel it.”
― Greg Iles, Cemetery Road

“Reality abides in the eyes.”
― Greg Iles, Cemetery Road

“The thing about kicking open a door to the past is that sometimes what’s behind it comes out under its own power.”
― Greg Iles, Cemetery Road

“It’s a grim reality, but the river towns are dying in Mississippi, by a slow exsanguination of people and talent that functions like a wasting disease.”
― Greg Iles, Cemetery Road

“Given the nature of the mind, we’ll consider the dreams of sleep to be the past, never quite accurate in recollection, always made to serve our desires (except when haunting us for our sins). And the wakeful present . . . well, it, too, holds its dangers.”
― Greg Iles, Cemetery Road

“To all those adults who return home to repay the debt of childhood, and find they never really left. Listen while you still can.”
― Greg Iles, Cemetery Road

“Men of integrity and courage are rare these days.”
― Greg Iles, Cemetery Road

“What a freakin’ idiot,” Denny mutters, as the deputy fires again. “Does he not realize those bullets have to come down somewhere?” I ask. “He flunked physics.”
― Greg Iles, Cemetery Road

“A slice off a cut loaf’s never missed, right?”
― Greg Iles, Cemetery Road

“I don’t recognize the world anymore, Marshall. Maybe when you stop feeling at home in the world, it’s time to leave it.”
― Greg Iles, Cemetery Road

“And the country has drifted so far off course, nobody even cares about the truth anymore.”
― Greg Iles, Cemetery Road

“Our people think the land of liberty’s their God-given”
― Greg Iles, Cemetery Road

“Posts oriented into a Woodhenge, a huge circle for astronomical observations.” “Like Stonehenge?” “Exactly like that. Or Cahokia, a similar site up in Illinois.”
― Greg Iles, Cemetery Road

“behind them.”
― Greg Iles, Cemetery Road

“something new every time.” The sound of forest insects comes from the phone. Then the screen lights up with the green sweep of my backyard. Even from the kitchen counter, I can see Jet’s naked body sitting astride mine on the patio steamer chair. “That didn’t come off Pornhub,” Paul says. “That’s the real deal.”
― Greg Iles, Cemetery Road

“Oh. Does Mississippi have some kind of grave-desecration statute? I know they differ from state to state.” “Mississippi does, thank God. Anybody who comes across human remains in this state must report them. And a discovery like that stops whatever’s going on around it. Even major construction. Doesn’t matter whether the land is public or private.”
― Greg Iles, Cemetery Road

“We rarely act from logic when facing the critical choices of our lives.”
― Greg Iles, Cemetery Road

“county rescue boat to recover the corpse. Normally, I would”
― Greg Iles, Cemetery Road