Every Cloak Rolled in Blood Quotes

“The possibility that matter can act as its own architect and create the human eye or brain strikes me as irrational.”
― James Lee Burke, Every Cloak Rolled in Blood

“But please don’t be taken aback. Age is not kind, and it leaves a mean stamp on an elderly man’s perceptions.”
― James Lee Burke, Every Cloak Rolled in Blood

“The degeneracy of a mob has no equal. It combines the mentality of the bigot, the coward, the sadist and the molester and the rapist. If there is an exception, I’ve yet to see it. I would love to line up a few of the participants in my sights.”
― James Lee Burke, Every Cloak Rolled in Blood

“Thank you, but the South is a state of mind rather than a place. Much of it is good, but much of it dark, thanks to our replication of original sin in the form of the Middle Passage. John Calvin and Cornelius Jansen spat in the punch bowl as well.”
― James Lee Burke, Every Cloak Rolled in Blood

“Chief Joseph already said it. “The place where I go is the place where I will be.”
― James Lee Burke, Every Cloak Rolled in Blood

“However, I have to free my mind of these concerns. I accept that I have to die this evening. But the manner in which that death comes is of enormous importance. Maybe those who die between fouled bedsheets are braver than the warrior who charges into the face of death. A feverish and degrading and debilitating death burns up the energy that physical courage and spiritual courage require. And dying by torture, as Saint Joan did at the stake, can be much worse. My stomach curdles when I look at the men with chains dripping from their hands.”
― James Lee Burke, Every Cloak Rolled in Blood

“I suspect the peak of Roland’s life was the morning in the year 778 when he rode up Roncevaux Pass with Charlemagne in the thin air of the Pyrenees and realized he had unknowingly gone through the metaphysical eye of the needle. He had entered immortality, and from that moment on, death could lay no claim on him.”
― James Lee Burke, Every Cloak Rolled in Blood

“The degeneracy of a mob has no equal. It combines the mentality of the bigot, the coward, the sadist and the molester and the rapist. If there is an exception, I’ve yet to see it. I would love to line up a few of the participants in my sights. Now they are surrounding my home, both the living and the dead.”
― James Lee Burke, Every Cloak Rolled in Blood

“I no longer care that my time on earth is coming to an end. What better way than in hot blood? Would you rather meet the grim reaper at Roncevaux or between bedsheets stiff with your own fluids?”
― James Lee Burke, Every Cloak Rolled in Blood

“I feel myself drifting off to sleep. Do you have those moments when you surrender your worries and let go of the earth and float away to a place where the stars look like a highway of crushed ice? It’s a safe place, in all probability the womb, surrounded by the humming of your mother’s blood, a cloak that is invulnerable. That’s where I find myself now.”
― James Lee Burke, Every Cloak Rolled in Blood

“Psychoneurotic anxiety and agitated depression coupled with an ideational personality produce a combination that is like being boiled alive.”
― James Lee Burke, Every Cloak Rolled in Blood

“Perhaps indeed the weights on the scale get balanced and in the fifth act a semblance of catharsis and order is imposed upon the players and we continue our lives and do our best until the day comes when we have to go either gentle or raging into that good night. I suspect the real issue is how we conduct ourselves when the ironies of fate seem more than the soul can bear.”
― James Lee Burke, Every Cloak Rolled in Blood

“Many years ago I learned that we discover the best and worst in people when they’re under duress. I think that principle has certainly borne out with my pitiful friend. I wish I had not been witness to it. I take his car keys and drive him to my home and keep him there until he’s sober. He weeps in shame before he drives himself home.”
― James Lee Burke, Every Cloak Rolled in Blood

“At four-twenty every morning I wake and have no idea where or who I am.”
― James Lee Burke, Every Cloak Rolled in Blood

“Evil is real. It is not an abstraction. The little boy will carry a reel of film inside his head until his death, and over the years few people will understand the haunted look that will swim into his eyes without apparent cause. What are its origins? I don’t know. A serpent in a tree? Maybe the La Brea Tar Pits? That’s not the issue. The real question is its level of intensity, its constant growth and replication, the incredible power it gives to political simpletons and street people alike.”
― James Lee Burke, Every Cloak Rolled in Blood

“Certain kinds of loss are forever. Not many people understand that.”
― James Lee Burke, Every Cloak Rolled in Blood

“I cannot envision eternity or infinity. I cannot understand the concept of endlessness. Nor do I understand how a primeval swamp can produce life-forms that can plan their own evolution and become sentient and functioning creatures with eyes and neurological systems and the ability to survive on a planet that had not cooled and whose skies were streaked with smoke from volcanoes as numerous as anthills. And for those reasons I try not to discount or reject possibilities of any kind, including the possibility that unseen entities exist just the other side of our fingertips.”
― James Lee Burke, Every Cloak Rolled in Blood

“I think the universe is infinite, but the terms “infinity” and “eternity” are abstractions that have no physical correlation. The possibility that matter can act as its own architect and create the human eye or brain strikes me as irrational. The great mystery for me has always been the presence of evil in the human breast. Animals kill in order to survive. The record of humankind is so bad we cannot look at it squarely in the face or dwell on its memory lest we become subsumed by it. No? Try watching the 1937 Japanese footage of their own crimes in Nanking. Or the footage from Auschwitz or Dachau or photographs from My Lai. Or read medieval accounts of disembowelment and burning of a condemned man’s entrails, followed by the drawing and quartering of his body, all of it performed alive.”
― James Lee Burke, Every Cloak Rolled in Blood

“How do you live with it, family and friends ask. The answer is I don’t. When you lose your kid, the best you can hope for is a scar rather than an open wound. I feel I’m in a house of mirrors, and I want to break every one of them.”
― James Lee Burke, Every Cloak Rolled in Blood

“I wasn’t a criminal, but I was genuinely insane. My greatest enemy is sleep. I see the men and boys I killed many years ago in a foreign land, and I’m filled with sorrow. Have you had those experiences, sir? Please tell me that is indeed the case and that you wish to get them out of your life. Can you do that for me, sir?”
― James Lee Burke, Every Cloak Rolled in Blood

“I will not accept my daughter’s death. I will find a way to pull her back through the veil or untether myself and lie down in the bottom of a boat that has no oars and float down the Columbia and into the Pacific, where she will be waiting for me somewhere beyond the sun.”
― James Lee Burke, Every Cloak Rolled in Blood

“But I don’t fear him, and that’s because I have never known a bully who was not a coward.”
― James Lee Burke, Every Cloak Rolled in Blood

“The only lesson I’ve learned in life is that the human personality does not change, and our propensity for destroying the earth and our fellow man is stronger and more wanton than it has ever been, and if the incineration of our cities and civilians and the increased lethality of our weapons during the last one hundred years has not taught us that, nothing will. I cannot envision eternity or infinity. I cannot understand the concept of endlessness. Nor do I understand how a primeval swamp can produce life-forms”
― James Lee Burke, Every Cloak Rolled in Blood

“As William Shakespeare said in Henry IV, “we owe God a death and let it go which way it will he that dies this year is quit for the next.”
― James Lee Burke, Every Cloak Rolled in Blood