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161 " But now that I’ve seen the reality up close, I understand white frustration. Black people here are just different. Not all of them, but so many. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because this was one of the biggest slaveholding cotton counties along the river. I don’t know. I used to think it was ignorance, but I’m starting to see it as willful ignorance, and maybe worse. "
― Greg Iles , Turning Angel (Penn Cage #2)
162 " Their belligerence in public places, their rudeness…there’s almost a pride in ignorance here. Black employees refuse to wait on white customers in stores. They treat incompetence as though it’s some kind of act of civil disobedience. I’m sick of it, Penn. "
163 " And the black politicians…my God. I’ve watched black aldermen do patently illegal things and then brag about it. They don’t care whether something is legal or not.” “White politicians abused the system for years, Caitlin. They just did it in a more subtle way.” “I know that. But is that an excuse for blacks to repeat the abuses of the old system? The system Martin Luther King and Malcolm X died to dismantle? "
164 " fuchsia-blooming crape myrtle trees, which are tended "
― Greg Iles , The Devil's Punchbowl (Penn Cage #3)
165 " The system is broken! And one of the reasons it’s broken down here is that it’s largely run by and for black people. They simply do not place a high cultural value on education, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise any longer.” I can’t believe it. Like so many Yankee transplants, Caitlin has had a dramatic change of heart on the issue of race. But though I’ve seen it before, I would never have expected it from her. “That’s a pretty racist view, Caitlin.” “I’m not a racist,” she asserts. “I’m a realist.” “If I said those things, I’d be labeled a racist. Does being from Boston make it all right for you to espouse those views? "
166 " down to brass tacks. What have you "
― Greg Iles , True Evil
167 " Caitlin is right, although her argument would probably offend every woman on the jury. "
168 " some of what she said actually offended me. Caitlin truly was a liberal when she arrived in Natchez, and she routinely chastised me for being too conservative. But now it seems that her liberal “convictions” weren’t convictions at all, but rather easy opinions based on the lectures of Ivy League professors. After a few years in the South, she’s ready to give up on racial harmony and flee to more “enlightened”—read homogenous—environs. "
169 " As I ponder Sonny’s life and death, it strikes me that, whatever his prejudices, he was one of the quiet heroes of this country. "
170 " wait "
― Greg Iles , 24 hours
171 " I’m not sure Shad’s worried about that. You said it yourself, his concern is the special election. That means making good on his promise to make the system equal, i.e., to nail a rich white man. That’s what will get Shad a unified black vote. I expect Judge Minor to move as fast as legally possible. "
172 " I’ve sometimes wondered whether human beings are like the universe itself, where 95 percent of what surrounds us is dark matter, and cannot be seen. The only way black holes can be detected is by the behavior of what’s around them—light and matter being distorted by immense forces within the collapsing star. Have I seen and yet not seen certain events that hint at deep, "
― Greg Iles , Natchez Burning (Penn Cage, #4)
173 " Of course you have. I’m a man, and I respond to all that you are. But I also feel things that a father feels for a daughter. Mainly, I feel very protective of you. And my first duty is to protect you from me. "
174 " When drug dealers get killed—black or white—the public perception is that the victims simply got what was coming to them. When a young girl is raped and murdered—black or white—our knowledge of the primitive laws of attraction and male sexual dominance informs our response. But when middle-aged white people minding their own business are murdered in their home in the safest part of town, the fundamental order of Southern life is thrown out of balance. "
175 " some harsher truths: that the world they will find beyond the borders of Mississippi looks very different from the one that nurtured them to this point; that the whites among them might soon find themselves the targets of prejudice for a change; "
176 " Where are you going?” Quentin asks. “To do my job. You need to start thinking about whether you’ve got what it takes to do yours.” “Hey, don’t—” I slam the door and hurry down the hall. The Brightside Manor Apartments stand like a visual reprimand to every liberal fantasy of government-subsidized housing. The dilapidated buildings look like sets built for a Blaxploitation flick from the seventies, like you could walk up and push them down with your foot. Thirteen big saltboxes grouped on the edge of St. Catherine’s Creek, all centered around a massive square of asphalt crowded with one of the strangest collections of motor transportation in the nation. "
177 " Some stories must wait to be told. Any writer worth his salt knows this. Sometimes you wait for events to percolate in your subconscious until a deeper truth emerges; other times you’re simply waiting for the principals to die. Sometimes it’s both. This story is like that. "
178 " At least fifty people are sitting or standing within sight of me. The oldest ones sit on their stoops beneath dented metal awnings. The middle-aged stand in little knots, the men sharing bottles wrapped in paper sacks, the women holding babies. I don’t see any teenagers—it’s as though they’ve been drafted for some special war—but several toddlers walk unsupervised through the parking lot. Three of them are naked. "
179 " to yearn for ignorance is to embrace the wishful thinking of a child. For once the stone hits the surface of the pond, the ripples never really stop. "
180 " Now it turns out he was having sex with his babysitter, and they’re so pissed off they’re about to pop. But their anger’s not really about Kate, you know? It’s about them. They feel betrayed. They put him up on a pedestal, and then he committed the crime of being human. So fuck him, right? Never mind that Kate was two weeks shy of eighteen, and on the make for exactly the kind of affair she had with Drew. "