In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead Quotes

“When people make a contract with the devil and give him an air-conditioned office to work in, he doesn't go back home easily.”
― James Lee Burke, In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead

“No matter what occurs in your life, no matter how bad the circumstances seem to be, you must never consider a dishonorable act as a viable alternative.”
― James Lee Burke, In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead

“When people make a contract with the devil and give him an air-conditioned office to work in, he doesn’t go back home easily.”
― James Lee Burke, In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead

“No matter what the other side does to you, you grin and walk through the cannon smoke. It drives them crazy.”
― James Lee Burke, In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead

“MY DREAMS TOOK me many places: sometimes back to a windswept firebase on the top of an orange hill gouged with shell holes; a soft, mist-streaked morning with ducks rising against a pink sun while my father and I crouched in the blind and waited for that heart-beating moment when their shadows would race across the cattails and reeds toward us; a lighted American Legion baseball diamond, where at age seventeen I pitched a perfect game against a team from Abbeville and a beautiful woman I didn’t know, perhaps ten years my senior, kissed me so hard on the mouth that my ears rang.”
― James Lee Burke, In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead

“What might be considered irrational, abnormal, aberrant, ludicrous, illogical, bizarre, schizoid, or schizophrenic to earth people (which is what AAs call nonalcoholics) is usually considered fairly normal by AA members.”
― James Lee Burke, In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead

“They see what they need to see. Black folk cain’t be choicy. They see what they gots to see.”
― James Lee Burke, In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead

“Jennifer, some people is suppose’ to have only what other people let them have.’ Lord God, her age and white and believing somet’ing like that.”
― James Lee Burke, In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead

“How many lives would have been spared had we not lent ourselves to the defense of a repellent cause like slavery?”
― James Lee Burke, In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead

“caused him to drop his membership in the ACLU and join the National Rifle Association.”
― James Lee Burke, In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead

“wimples”
― James Lee Burke, In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead

“Then millions of lights came on in the canyons, along the freeways, and through the vast sweep of the Los Angeles basin, and it was almost as if you were looking down upon the end point of the American dream, a geographical poem into which all our highways eventually led, a city of illusion founded by conquistadors and missionaries and consigned to the care of angels, where far below the spinning propellers of our seaplane black kids along palm-tree-lined streets in Watts hunted each other with automatic weapons.”
― James Lee Burke, In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead

“I don't like to bust drunk drivers. I don't like to listen to their explanations, watch their pitiful attempts to affect sobriety, or see the sheen of fear break out in their eyes when they realize they're headed for the drunk tank with little to look forward to in the morning except the appearance of their names in the newspaper. Or maybe in truth I just don't like to see myself when I look into their faces.”
― James Lee Burke, In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead

“He wavin’ at you, Dave. Hey, it’s that drunk man done fell in the bayou the ot’er night. That man must surely love water.”
― James Lee Burke, In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead

“I went to the bathroom in my pants. That’s what you done, man.”
― James Lee Burke, In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead

“I messed my pants,” he said.”
― James Lee Burke, In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead

“At age nineteen I did not want to accept the possibility that a man’s murder could be treated with the social significance of a hangnail that had been snipped off someone’s finger.”
― James Lee Burke, In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead