A Private Cathedral Quotes

“But everyone has a private cathedral that he earns, a special place to which he returns when the world is too much late and soon, and loss and despair come with the rising of the sun.”
― James Lee Burke, A Private Cathedral

“There’s enough evil in the human heart to incinerate the earth.”
― James Lee Burke, A Private Cathedral

“Did you know that the hum of a car engine through the metal and seats is approximately in B-flat, the same as the hum of blood in the arteries of a pregnant woman? That’s why children sleep so easily in the backseat of an automobile.”
― James Lee Burke, A Private Cathedral

“Many people do not understand that drug and alcohol addiction are joined at the hip with clinical depression and psychoneurotic anxiety. The combination of the two is devastating. An outsider has no comprehension of the misery that a clinically depressed person carries. The pain is like dealing with an infected gland. One touch and the entire system tries to shut down, because the next stop might be the garden of Gethsemane.”
― James Lee Burke, A Private Cathedral

“We’re living in weird times, Streak. I bet forty percent of the country wouldn’t mind firing up the ovens as long as the smokestacks are blowing downwind.”
― James Lee Burke, A Private Cathedral

“In the American South, there is a kind of lawman every decent cop instantly recognizes. His uniform is usually soiled and wrinkled, more like army fatigues or marine utilities, as though he has worked long hours in it. If allowed, he wears a coned cowboy hat. His posture and physicality exude a quiet sense of confidence, whether he’s leaning against a rail or gazing idly at something he doesn’t like. There is no moral light in his eyes. For reasons you cannot explain, he bears an animus toward the world, particularly toward people of color, no matter how poor or powerless they are.”
― James Lee Burke, A Private Cathedral

“motivation may be no more complex than that of an angry child flinging scat because he was left with regularity in a dirty diaper.”
― James Lee Burke, A Private Cathedral

“Profanity is the tool early man used to ward off situations he couldn’t change—in other words, a confession of inadequacy.”
― James Lee Burke, A Private Cathedral

“The recidivists think their rap sheets have the historical importance of the Magna Carta; their jailhouse tats are the equivalent of military citations.”
― James Lee Burke, A Private Cathedral

“drug and alcohol addiction are joined at the hip with clinical depression and psychoneurotic anxiety.”
― James Lee Burke, A Private Cathedral

“drunk feels for his glass. It is stronger and worse than any sexual desire, any fear of hell, any allegiance to family, country, or church.”
― James Lee Burke, A Private Cathedral

“May the road rise up to meet you
May the wind be always at your back
May the sun shine warm upon your face
The rains fall soft upon your fields
And until we meet again
May God hold you in the palm of His hand.”
― James Lee Burke, A Private Cathedral

“and I set it on the night table. I feared for Clete. I was protected by the culture of law enforcement, one that is ferociously tribal in nature. Clete was a disgraced cop, a lone soul sowing destruction and chaos everywhere he went, and hated by the Mob and NOPD. I felt his eyes on the side of my face.”
― James Lee Burke, A Private Cathedral

“She ran away from home at age seventeen and hooked up with three outlaw bikers who gang-raped her on the way to Sturgis. She had an abortion in Memphis and spent three months in jail for soliciting at a truck stop on I-40. The next two stops were Big D and New Orleans and runway gigs with a G-string and pasties, then Acapulco and Vegas with oilmen who could buy Third World countries with their credit cards. Miami was even more lucrative. She went to work for a former CIA agent turned political operative who set up cameras in hotel rooms and blackmailed corporate executives and Washington insiders. She helped destroy careers and lives and woke up one morning next to the corpse of a married man who died from an overdose in his sleep and whose family she had to face at the police station. One week later, she swallowed half a bottle of downers, turned on the gas in the oven, and stuck her head in. Three weeks later, she slashed her wrists. One month after that, she helped a pimp roll a blind man. It’s not the kind of personal history you forget.”
― James Lee Burke, A Private Cathedral

“Seventh Seal”
― James Lee Burke, A Private Cathedral

“reread James Street’s Tap Roots and By Valour and Arms, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, MacKinlay Kantor’s Andersonville, Bruce Catton’s A Stillness at Appomattox, and all the works of Shelby Foote.”
― James Lee Burke, A Private Cathedral

“Roncesvalles;”
― James Lee Burke, A Private Cathedral

“and began making coffee without asking permission.”
― James Lee Burke, A Private Cathedral

“knew the questions that would be asked of me, but I did not fear them. The questions I had to ask myself were another matter.”
― James Lee Burke, A Private Cathedral

“People who commit suicide in a dramatic fashion often have an agenda and are involved in a fantasy that leads to their death. They’re filled with rage and seek revenge against those who have hurt them. They slash their wrists or jump from buildings or fire bullets into their brain. In their fantasy, they witness the discovery of their body by people they hate. In that way, they leave behind a legacy of guilt and sorrow.”
― James Lee Burke, A Private Cathedral

“Her hair smelled like the Caribbean.”
― James Lee Burke, A Private Cathedral

“Here’s the strange thing about death. At a certain age it’s always with you, lurking in the shade, pulling at your ankles, whispering in your ear when you pass a crypt. But it doesn’t get your real attention until you find yourself alone at home and the wind swells inside the rooms and stresses the joists and lets you know what silence and solitude are all about.”
― James Lee Burke, A Private Cathedral

“Are the very rich very different from you and me? What an absurdity. How about this as a better question: In what way are they similar to us?”
― James Lee Burke, A Private Cathedral

“Maybe they used drugs on you. Maybe they didn’t need drugs. They have powers we don’t understand.”
― James Lee Burke, A Private Cathedral

“His jaw went slack, the way an old man’s does when his thought processes take him into blind alleys.”
― James Lee Burke, A Private Cathedral

“If you’re given to depression, the fading of the day can seep into your soul and bind your heart and shut the light from your eyes. During those moments when I’m tempted to let my thoughts be drawn into the great shade, I seek out the company of animals and try to take joy in the transfiguration of the earth as the sun’s afterglow is absorbed into the roots and trunks of the trees and the clumps of four-o’clocks and the Teche itself at high tide, when the light is sealed beneath the water and shines like rippling gold coins in the”
― James Lee Burke, A Private Cathedral

“I wish I had all the answers,” he said. “Like knowing the mind of God. I’d love to get in on that.”
― James Lee Burke, A Private Cathedral

“I have long believed that my generation is a transitional one and will be the last to remember what we refer to as traditional America.”
― James Lee Burke, A Private Cathedral

“He sought revenge on others for his own failure, and helped inculcate racial hatred and fear in the electorate to divide us against ourselves.”
― James Lee Burke, A Private Cathedral

“But I do believe there are people in our midst who wish to make a graveyard of the world, and their motivation may be no more complex than that of an angry child flinging scat because he was left with regularity in a dirty diaper.”
― James Lee Burke, A Private Cathedral