Purple Cane Road Quotes

“Then Belmont discovered the carnival world of Louisiana politics, in the way a mental patient might wander into a theme park for the insane and realize that life held more promise than he had ever dreamed.

Burke, James Lee. Purple Cane Road (Dave Robicheaux Book 11)”
― James Lee Burke, Purple Cane Road

“I told myself I did not have to live as I once did. I did not have to re-create the violent moments that used to come aborning like a sulfurous match flaring off a thumbnail.”
― James Lee Burke, Purple Cane Road

“Then I saw the consuming nature of her fear, her willingness to believe that exploitative charlatans could change her fate or really cared what happened to her, the dread and angst that congealed like a cold vapor around her heart when she awoke each morning, one day closer to the injection table at Angola.”
― James Lee Burke, Purple Cane Road

“I returned to New Orleans and my problems with pari-mutuel windows and a dark-haired, milk-skinned wife from Martinique who went home with men from the Garden District while I was passed out in a houseboat on Lake Pontchartrain, the downdraft of U.S. Army helicopters flattening a plain of elephant grass in my dreams.”
― James Lee Burke, Purple Cane Road

“I don’t know how good a father I was, but I had learned that when your daughter is between the ages of thirteen and seventeen, you will never win an argument with her, and if you fall back on anger and recrimination and coercion to prevail over her, you will come to loathe your triumph and the weakness it disguises and you will not easily find forgiveness for it in either her or yourself.”
― James Lee Burke, Purple Cane Road

“Age has brought me few gifts, but one of them has been a degree of humility, at least a sufficient amount so that I no longer feel compelled to take my own inventory and I can surrender that terrible burden to my Higher Power.”
― James Lee Burke, Purple Cane Road

“But it was more than my mother’s death that obsessed me. Long ago I had accepted the loss of my natal family and my childhood and the innocence of the Cajun world I had been born into. You treat loss just like death. It visits everyone and you don’t let it prevail in your life.”
― James Lee Burke, Purple Cane Road

“You had to find a leader, a man you could respect, and put your faith in him, just as he placed his faith in you. His father called it a reciprocity of personal honor. Axel’s”
― James Lee Burke, Purple Cane Road

“solipsistic,”
― James Lee Burke, Purple Cane Road

“But I had learned long ago that unless you’ve had your own ticket punched in the Garden of Gethsemane, you shouldn’t judge those whose fate it is to visit there.”
― James Lee Burke, Purple Cane Road

“According to his obituary, Robert Mitchum, when released from jail after serving time for marijuana possession, was asked what it was like inside the slams. He replied, “Not bad. Kind of like Palm Springs without the riffraff.”
― James Lee Burke, Purple Cane Road

“Ernest Hemingway said chasing the past is a bum way to live your life,” the sheriff said. “He also said he never took his own advice.”
― James Lee Burke, Purple Cane Road

“You treat loss just like death. It visits everyone and you don’t let it prevail in your life.”
― James Lee Burke, Purple Cane Road

“Barbara Shanahan, sometimes known as Battering Ram Shanahan. She was over six feet tall and had freckles and wore her light red hair cut short and wore a blue suit with white hose. She worked hard and was a good prosecutor, and I had always wanted to like her. But she seldom smiled and she went about her job with the abrasiveness of a carpenter building coffins with a nail gun.”
― James Lee Burke, Purple Cane Road

“Night Comes to the Cumberland.”
― James Lee Burke, Purple Cane Road

“A wet cigarette butt clung to my cheek like a mashed cockroach. I could smell whiskey and beer in my clothes and Gable’s blood on my knuckles and I swore I could taste whiskey surging out of my stomach into my throat, like an old friend who has come back in a time of need.”
― James Lee Burke, Purple Cane Road

“I hit him so hard spittle and blood flew from his mouth onto a woman’s blouse four feet away. I drove my fist into his kidney, a blow that made his back arch as though his spine had been broken, then I hooked him with a left below the eye and drove a right cross into his jaw that knocked him across a folding table.”
― James Lee Burke, Purple Cane Road