If anyone tells you he’s from New Orleans and doesn’t drink, he’s probably not from New Orleans. Louisiana is not a state; it’s an outdoor mental asylum in which millions of people stay bombed most of their lives. That’s not an exaggeration. Cirrhosis is a family heirloom.

— James Lee Burke

James Lee Burke Quotes

Baptized Christians ran the ovens in the camps.

— James Lee Burke

There are those who are made different in the womb.

— James Lee Burke

Mexico was not a country, Krill thought. It was a revolution that had never stopped.

— James Lee Burke

I had learned long ago that resolution by itself is not enough; we are what we do, not what we think and feel.

— James Lee Burke

I wanted to believe he was mad. Unfortunately, I no longer knew what madness was.

— James Lee Burke

Then she walked away, like Helen of Troy turning her back on Attica. A gust of warm wind blew newspapers along the boulevard into the sky. The light was orange and bleeding out of the clouds in the west, the horizon darkening, the waves crashing on the beach just the other side of Seawall Boulevard, the palm trees rattling dryly in the wind. I could smell the salt and the seaweed and the tiny shellfish that had dried on the beach, like the smell of birth. I.

— James Lee Burke

You pull on dat ’gator’s tail, he gonna clean your kneecaps, him.

— James Lee Burke

Sometimes your luck runs out and you have to accept the life you had planned was a dream written on water.

— James Lee Burke

As with all megalomaniacs, he had no handles. He was the type of man the Spanish call sin dios, sin verguenza, without God or shame.

— James Lee Burke

If you’re wired a certain way, you’ll always be in morion, clicking to your own rhythm, all of it in four-four time, avoiding convention and predictability and control as you would a sickness, the whole world waiting for you like an enormous dance pavilion lit by colored lights and surrounded with palm trees. I’m not talking about the dirty boogie. The music of the spheres is right outside your bedroom window.

— James Lee Burke

At a certain age, you realize the greatest loss you can experience is a theft you perpetrate upon yourself – the waste of days given us. Is there any more piercing remorse than the realization that a person has thrown away the potential that resides in every sunrise?

— James Lee Burke

Not everybody gets to see a blinding light on the way to Damascus.

— James Lee Burke

Deviants and monsters ran the camps where families were sent up the chimney or turned into bars of soap, but they would have been powerless without the clerks who sat anonymously behind typewriters and gave them bureaucratic legitimacy.

— James Lee Burke

But the rain gods went away. They ain’t coming back, either.” “How do you know that?” “They got no reason to. We don’t believe in them no more.

— James Lee Burke

Gamblers and lovers pay big dues and enjoy limited consolations. But sometimes they are enough.

— James Lee Burke

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

There’s enough evil in the human heart to incinerate the earth.

— James Lee Burke

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

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

I sometimes subscribe to the belief that all historical events occur simultaneously, like a dream in the mind of God. Perhaps it is only man who views time sequentially and tries to impose a solar calendar upon it. What if other people, both dead and unborn, are living out their lives in the same space we occupy, without our knowledge or consent?

— James Lee Burke
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