Another Kind of Eden Quotes

“She wore a black blouse with a white lace collar and had an animated sternness about her that suggested a conjugal situation similar to waking up each morning on a medieval rack.”
― James Lee Burke, Another Kind of Eden

“I knew my thoughts were going to a bad place. There is a strange phenomenon among human beings to which most of us are susceptible. It’s an affliction that contaminates our vision of the world and invades the heart and the mind and the soul. Its origins are always the same: the sudden recognition that you are unloved or, worse, that you are unworthy of love. When that happens, you sail your ship alone, with no harbor lights in sight and no companion except the wind.”
― James Lee Burke, Another Kind of Eden

“I’m just saying most people don’t get to choose who they are. It’s a lesson I’ve never learned very well.”
― James Lee Burke, Another Kind of Eden

“sometimes”
― James Lee Burke, Another Kind of Eden

“I do not mean to assault anyone’s sensibilities, but once you face death or reach out and touch it with your hand, or look into the half-lidded eyes of a woman or child or man whose life has been violently taken, you bond with them and silently try to console them for the theft of their lives. You promise to carry them in your heart and never tell anyone about it. I think that’s what humanity is about.”
― James Lee Burke, Another Kind of Eden

“He bore his friends no animus for their innocence, but he hated the Krupps and DuPonts of the world and the politicians who became teary-eyed and saccharine as they waved the flag and sent others to die in the wars they caused.”
― James Lee Burke, Another Kind of Eden

“The breeze was cool and warm at the same time, the leaves on the cottonwoods turning gold and flickering in the sunlight, the shadows of sparrow hawks gliding across the pasture. I wondered if Eden had been like this. I also wondered if the founders of our country had this very scene in mind when they envisioned the agrarian republic. And I wondered if they regretted staining it, just as Eden had been stained, when they placed a portion of the human family in shackles and chains and murdered unknown numbers of indigenous people.”
― James Lee Burke, Another Kind of Eden

“PEOPLE WHO ARE unknowledgeable about agriculture often refer to farm labor as unskilled. Take bucking bales. Try inserting your fingers inside the twine on ninety pounds of compacted grass after it has been rained on, then flinging it up on the flatbed of a truck and repeating the process every four minutes for eight hours. If you want to up the ante, do it in an electric storm.”
― James Lee Burke, Another Kind of Eden

“Her fingers were as light and cool as refrigerated air, and she did something no girl or woman had ever done to me before. She leaned over and kissed each of my eyelids and my mouth, then continued to stroke my hair with her nails until I felt myself drifting away, free of all pain and age, free of the evil that undid Eden and set brother against brother and left us forever wounded and benighted and at war with ourselves and the earth.”
― James Lee Burke, Another Kind of Eden

“youth is its own narcotic, its impermanence our greatest worry and greatest loss. So why put on sackcloth and ashes over the memories we should guard like blue diamonds the rest of our lives?”
― James Lee Burke, Another Kind of Eden

“The air was bright with a clean, cold smell like dark water dipped out of a rain barrel in winter, perhaps a harbinger that the gifts of the earth are many, all of them waiting to be discovered.”
― James Lee Burke, Another Kind of Eden

“Edwin Arlington Robinson once wrote that God slays Himself with every leaf that flies. I think the same is true of us. I think we cannot understand ourselves until we understand that living is a form of dying. My generation was born during the Great Depression and, for good or bad, will probably be the last generation to remember traditional America. Our deaths may be inconsequential; the fling we had was not.”
― James Lee Burke, Another Kind of Eden

“The lack of expression in Detective Benbow was the kind you see in people who have witnessed events that forever change their view of the world. They never talk about it or struggle with it. Instead, they accept the fact that human beings are capable of deeds Satan couldn’t think up.”
― James Lee Burke, Another Kind of Eden

“I can’t really say.” “It amounts to believing others when they tell you you’re a good fellow. Give that some thought.”
― James Lee Burke, Another Kind of Eden

“I also wondered if this plateau high above the Great American Desert wasn’t more than just the earth, in the same way you wonder sometimes if we are not already inside eternity. I wondered if the columns of sunlight spearing through the clouds on the hillsides and the meadows and the dairy barns and the freshly plowed acreage and the cottonwood trees along the stream were not indeed the pillars of heaven, rising into a kingdom where our predecessors were at work and play in the fields of the Lord.”
― James Lee Burke, Another Kind of Eden

“There is no more grand moment in a writer’s life than typing the first sentence of a new book.”
― James Lee Burke, Another Kind of Eden

“There is a strange phenomenon among human beings to which most of us are susceptible. It’s an affliction that contaminates our vision of the world and invades the heart and the mind and the soul. Its origins are always the same: the sudden recognition that you are unloved or, worse, that you are unworthy of love. When that happens, you sail your ship alone, with no harbor lights in sight and no companion except the wind.”
― James Lee Burke, Another Kind of Eden

“It's an affliction that contaminates our vision of the world and invades the heart and the mind and the soul. It's origins are always the same: the sudden recognition that you are unloved or, worse, that you are unworthy of love. When that happens, you sail your ship alone, with no harbor lights in sight and no companion except the wind.”
― James Lee Burke, Another Kind of Eden