174 Quotes by James Lee Burke

God bless the Reference Librarians.

Sometimes when that kind of evil comes into our lives, we can’t explain it, so we blame it on God or ourselves. In both cases we’re wrong. Maybe it’s time you let yourself out of prison.

You don’t have anything, you don’t know anything, you’re just a noise like a fart in somebody’s pants,” Segura said.

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.

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

What happens outside of us doesn’t count. That’s something we don’t have control over. It’s what we do with it, the way that we react to it, that’s important.

Age is a peculiar kind of thief. It slips up on you and steps inside your skin and is so quiet and methodical in its work that you never realize it has stolen your youth until you look into the mirror one morning and see a man you don’t recognize.

Baptized Christians ran the ovens in the camps.

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