James Lee Burke quotes: top famous quotes and sayings by James Lee Burke

Top James Lee Burke Quotes

Browse top 67 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by James Lee Burke.

Favorite James Lee Burke Quotes

1. "Humility is not a virtue in a writer, it is an absolute necessity." ~ James Lee Burke

2. "The wind smelled of humus, lichen, the musky odor of pecan husks broken under the shoe, a sunshower on the fields across the bayou. But any poetry that might have been contained in that moment was lost when I stared into Honoria's face, convinced that human insanity was as close to our fingertips as the act of rubbing fog off a window pane." ~ James Lee Burke

3. "I'm over the hill for come-on lines. On a quiet day, I can hear my liver rotting. For exercise, I fall down. ~ Clete" ~ James Lee Burke

4. "In that moment, when watches and clocks misbehave and you feel a cold vapor wrap itself around your heart, you unconsciously draw a line at the bottom of a long column of numbers and come up with a sum. Perhaps it's one that fills you with contentment and endows you with a level of courage and an acceptance that you didn't know you possessed.Or maybe not." ~ James Lee Burke

5. "Every third night a commitee holds a meeting in my head." ~ James Lee Burke

6. "...big as a horse turd floating in a milk shake."Wyatt Dixson" ~ James Lee Burke

7. "THE ALLURE OF Montana is like a commitment to a narcotic; you can never use it up or get enough of it. Its wilderness areas probably resemble the earth on the first day of creation." ~ James Lee Burke

8. "Age is a clever thief. It takes a little from you each day, so you're not aware of your loss until it'd irreversible." ~ James Lee Burke

9. "..why is it that in problematic situations almost everyone resorts to axioms and societal remedies that in actuality almost nobody believes in?...ask yourself, have you ever known anyone whose marriage was saved by a marriage counselor, whose drinking was cured by a psychiatrist, whose son was kept out of reform school by a social worker?" ~ James Lee Burke

10. "If we break promises to God, shouldn't we be allowed an occasional violation of our word to our friends and superiors?" ~ James Lee Burke

11. "I also believe my home state is cursed by ignorance and poverty and racism, much of it deliberately inculcated to control a vulnerable electorate. And I believe many of the politicians in Louisiana are among the most stomach-churning examples of white trash and venality I have ever known. To me, the fact that large numbers of people find them humorously picaresque is mind numbing, on a level with telling fond tales of one's rapist." ~ James Lee Burke

12. "A tanker truck appeared far down the wavy surface of the highway, headlights on, its weight and shimmering cylindrical shape and dedicated purpose so great and unrelenting that it seemed to move and jitter against the sun's afterglow without sound or mechanically driven power, sustained by its own momentum, as though the truck had a destiny that had been planned long ago." ~ James Lee Burke

13. "The armies of the night are faceless and mindless and the modern equivalent of Visigoths, but when they have a leader, their time in history rolls around again." ~ James Lee Burke

14. "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

15. "The air smelled like Bayou Teche when it's spring and the fish are spawning among the water hyacinths and the frogs are throbbing in the cattails and the flooded cypress." ~ James Lee Burke

16. "As a revolutionary people, we Americans won a probable victory over the best and biggest army in the world because we learned to fight from the Indians. You can do a lot of damage with a Kentucky rifle from behind a tree. You don't put on a peaked hat and a red coat and white leggings and crossed white bandoleers with a big silver buckle in the center of the X and march uphill into a line of Howitzers loaded with chain and chopped horseshoes." ~ James Lee Burke

17. "I looked at Lucas with the pang that a parent feels when he knows his child will be hurt and that it's no one's fault and that to try to preempt the rites of passage is an act of contempt for the child's courage." ~ James Lee Burke

18. "But no one could say he hadn't gotten even. He could not count the field women whom he had sexually degraded and demoralized and in whom he had left his seed so their bastard children would be a daily visual reminder of what a plantation white man could do to a plantation black woman whenever he wanted, nor could he count the black men whom he had made fear his blackjack as they would fear Satan himself, making each of them a lifetime enemy of all white people." ~ James Lee Burke

19. "I would almost forget about Ida Durbin. But a sin of omission, if indeed that's what it was, can be like the rusty head of a hatchet buried in the heartwood of a tree -- it eventually finds the teeth of a whirling saw blade." ~ James Lee Burke

20. "I had seen a dawn like this one only twice in my life: once in Vietnam, when a Bouncing Betty had risen from the earth on a night trail and twisted its tentacles of light around my thighs, and years earlier outside of Franklin, Louisiana, when my father and I discovered the body of a labor organizer who had been crucified with sixteen-penny nails, ankle and wrist, against a barn wall. - Sunset Limited" ~ James Lee Burke

21. "Jimmie would forever be the Renaissance humanist, bearing his faith and optimism like a white light inside a chalice." ~ James Lee Burke

22. "I made her talk about her family, her home, her music, and her work, everything that defined who she was before Bobby Joe had touched her with his probing hands." ~ James Lee Burke

23. "god bless the world" ~ James Lee Burke

24. "One day you'll have a quiet heart." ~ James Lee Burke

25. "The Gulf Stream waters of Woody Guthrie's famous song were strung with columns of oil that were several miles long." ~ James Lee Burke

26. "soldiers who return from foreign battlefields with a syndrome that survivors of the Great War called the thousand-yard stare." ~ James Lee Burke

27. "But perhaps age has taught me that the earth is still new, molten at the core and still forming, that black leaves in the winter forest will crawl with life in the spring, that our story is ongoing and it is indeed a crime to allow the heart's energies to dissipate with the fading of light on the horizon." ~ James Lee Burke

28. "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

29. "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

30. "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

31. "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

32. "What kind of trees are those?" I asked."Heartwood," my father said. "They grow in layers, like the spirit does. That's what Grandpa Sam used to say, anyway. You just got to keep the roots in a clear stream and not let nobody taint the water for you." ~ James Lee Burke

33. "God bless the Reference Librarians" ~ James Lee Burke

34. "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

35. "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?"The Glass Rainbow, p. 138" ~ James Lee Burke

36. "In the alluvial sweep of the land, I thought I could see the past and the present and the future all at once, as though time were not sequential in nature but took place without a beginning or an end, like a flash of green light rippling outward from the center of creation, not unlike a dream inside the mind of God." ~ James Lee Burke

37. "No one likes to be afraid. Fear is the enemy of love & faith & it robs us of our sleep & our sunrise & makes us treacherous & venal& fills our glands with toxins & effaces our identity & gives flight to any vestige of self respect. If you have ever been afraid, truly afraid, in a way that makes your hair soggy with sweat & turns your skin gray & fouls your blood & spiritually eviscerates you to the point you cannot pray, lest your prayers be a concession to your conviction that you're about to die, you know what I am talking about. If you do not have the option of either fleeing or attacking your adversary, your level of fear will grow to the point where you feel like your skin is being stripped from your bones." ~ James Lee Burke

38. "I used to save all my rejection slips because I told myself, one day I'm going to autograph these and auction them. And then I lost the box." ~ James Lee Burke

39. "Never read bad stuff if you're an artist; it will impair your own game." ~ James Lee Burke

40. "I wouldn't write anything autobiographical. If you've lived a life like Laurence of Arabia, it might be a consideration, but otherwise it's a little bit vain, it seems to me." ~ James Lee Burke

41. "If there is any human tragedy, there is only one, and it occurs when we forget who we are and remain silent while a stranger takes up residence inside our skin." ~ James Lee Burke

42. "How do you caution a fawn about a cigarette a motorist has just flipped from his car window into a patch of yellow grass, or tell a sparrow that winged creatures eventually plummet to earth?" ~ James Lee Burke

43. "Why do I always feel like you're trying to staple my umbilical cord to the corner of your desk?" ~ James Lee Burke

44. "Then the sun broke above the crest of the hills and the entire countryside looked soaked in blood, the arroyos deep in shadow, the cones of dead volcanoes stark and biscuit-colored against the sky. I could smell pinion trees, wet sage, woodsmoke, cattle in the pastures, and creek water that had melted from snow. I could smell the way the country probably was when it was only a dream in the mind of God." ~ James Lee Burke

45. "The evening sky was streaked with purple, the color of torn plums, and a light rain had started to fall when I came to the end of the blacktop road that cut through twenty miles of thick, almost impenetrable scrub oak and pine and stopped at the front gate of Angola penitentiary." ~ James Lee Burke

46. "...young people...who were casually profane, as though the validation of their own power could be achieved only by their assault on the sensibilities of others." ~ James Lee Burke

47. "I used to know a carnival man turned preacher who said the key to his success was understanding the people of what he called Snake's Navel, Arkansas. He said in Snake's Navel, the biggest thing going on Saturday night was the Dairy Queen. He said you could get the people there to do damn near anything --pollute their own water, work at five-dollar-an-hour jobs, drive fifty miles to a health clinic-- as long as you packaged it right. That meant you gave them a light show and faith healings and blow-down-the-walls gospel music with a whole row of American flags across the stage. He said what they liked best, though --what really got them to pissing all over themselves-- was to be told it was other people going to hell and not them. He said people in Snake's Navel wasn't real fond of homosexuals and Arabs and Hollywood Jews, although he didn't use them kinds of terms in his sermons." ~ James Lee Burke

48. "writing is like being in love. You never get better at it or learn more about it. The day you think you do is the day you lose it. Robert Frost called his work a lover's quarrel with the world. It's ongoing. It has neither a beginning nor an end. You don't have to worry about learning things. The fire of one's art burns all the impurities from the vessel that contains it." ~ James Lee Burke

49. ". . . I had found the edge. The place where you unstrap all your fastenings to the earth, to what you are what you have been, where you flame out on the edge of the spheres, and the sun and moon become eclipsed and the world below is as dead and remote and without interest as if it were glazed with ice." ~ James Lee Burke

50. "...and I wonder if there is any way to adequately describe the folly that causes us to undo all the great gifts of both Earth and Heaven." ~ James Lee Burke

First «12 »Last

James Lee Burke Quotes Pictures

James Lee Burke Quotes

James Lee Burke Quotes

James Lee Burke Quotes

<< Kohta Hirano Quotes

Elliott Bisnow Quotes >>

Today's Quote

We are all mediums for our own basic truths. All we really have in life is the primal force that moves us through our days--our unvarnished, untutored, ever-present, inborn agency."
Author: A.S.A. Harrison

What Did James Lee Burke Talk About?

Famous Authors

Jimmy Webb Quotes (6 sayings)
Aynsley Dunbar Quotes (1 sayings)
Theresa Breslin Quotes (12 sayings)
Frank Graves Quotes (1 sayings)
Logan Crowe Quotes (1 sayings)
Rachel Shukert Quotes (3 sayings)
Charles Kimbrough Quotes (3 sayings)
Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew Quotes (2 sayings)
Philip Knight Quotes (1 sayings)
Ronnie Radke Quotes (3 sayings)

Popular Topics