Explore Quotes by James Lee Burke

Why do I always feel like you're trying to staple my umbilical cord to the corner of your desk?

It has been my experience that most human stories are circular rather than linear. Regardless of the path we choose, we somehow end up where we commenced - in part, I suspect, because the child who lives in us goes along for the ride.

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.

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.

We decry violence all the time in this country, but look at our history. We were born in a violent revolution, and we've been in wars ever since. We're not a pacific people.

There's nothing like rejection to make you do an inventory of yourself.

Humility is not a virtue in a writer, it is an absolute necessity.

And every good artist knows that the gift comes from somewhere else, and it's there for a reason, and that's to make the world a better place.

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

A lie is an act of theft. It steals peoples faith and makes them resent themselves

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.

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.

How do you explain to yourself the casual manner in which you threw your life away?

Money can't buy happiness but it'll sure keep a mess of grief off your front porch.

I believe every...man remembers the girl he thinks he should have married. She reappears to him in his lonely moments, or he sees her in the face of a young girl in the park, buying a snowball under an oak tree by the baseball diamond. But she belongs to back there, to somebody else, and that thought sometimes rends your heart in a way that you never share with anyone else.

Louisiana is a fresh-air mental asylum.

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?

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.

God bless the Reference Librarians