174 Quotes by 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.

We all have an extended family, people whom we recognize as our own as soon as we see them.

One day you’ll have a quiet heart.

A category 5 hurricane carries an explosive force several times greater than that of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.

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

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

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 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.

Prosecutors often wince when they have to take a child abuser to trial, because usually the only witnesses they can use are children who are terrified at the prospect of testifying against their parents.