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A Private Cathedral (Dave Robicheaux #23) QUOTES

A Private Cathedral (Dave Robicheaux #23) QUOTES

1 " May the road rise up to meet you
May the wind be always at your back
May the sun shine warm upon your face
The rains fall soft upon your fields
And until we meet again
May God hold you in the palm of His hand. "

― James Lee Burke , A Private Cathedral (Dave Robicheaux #23)

2 " But everyone has a private cathedral that he earns, a special place to which he returns when the world is too much late and soon, and loss and despair come with the rising of the sun. "

― James Lee Burke , A Private Cathedral (Dave Robicheaux #23)

3 " There’s enough evil in the human heart to incinerate the earth. "

― James Lee Burke , A Private Cathedral (Dave Robicheaux #23)

4 " Did you know that the hum of a car engine through the metal and seats is approximately in B-flat, the same as the hum of blood in the arteries of a pregnant woman? That’s why children sleep so easily in the backseat of an automobile. "

― James Lee Burke , A Private Cathedral (Dave Robicheaux #23)

5 " Profanity is the tool early man used to ward off situations he couldn’t change—in other words, a confession of inadequacy. "

― James Lee Burke , A Private Cathedral (Dave Robicheaux #23)

6 " Mark Shondell could lay no such claim. He sought revenge on others for his own failure, and helped inculcate racial hatred and fear in the electorate to divide us against ourselves. I had known his kind all my life. "

― James Lee Burke , A Private Cathedral (Dave Robicheaux #23)

7 " But I do believe there are people in our midst who wish to make a graveyard of the world, and their motivation may be no more complex than that of an angry child flinging scat because he was left with regularity in a dirty diaper. "

― James Lee Burke , A Private Cathedral (Dave Robicheaux #23)

8 " knew the questions that would be asked of me, but I did not fear them. The questions I had to ask myself were another matter. "

― James Lee Burke , A Private Cathedral (Dave Robicheaux #23)

9 " drunk feels for his glass. It is stronger and worse than any sexual desire, any fear of hell, any allegiance to family, country, or church. "

― James Lee Burke , A Private Cathedral (Dave Robicheaux #23)

10 " Roncesvalles; "

― James Lee Burke , A Private Cathedral (Dave Robicheaux #23)

11 " People who commit suicide in a dramatic fashion often have an agenda and are involved in a fantasy that leads to their death. They’re filled with rage and seek revenge against those who have hurt them. They slash their wrists or jump from buildings or fire bullets into their brain. In their fantasy, they witness the discovery of their body by people they hate. In that way, they leave behind a legacy of guilt and sorrow. "

― James Lee Burke , A Private Cathedral (Dave Robicheaux #23)

12 " Here’s the strange thing about death. At a certain age it’s always with you, lurking in the shade, pulling at your ankles, whispering in your ear when you pass a crypt. But it doesn’t get your real attention until you find yourself alone at home and the wind swells inside the rooms and stresses the joists and lets you know what silence and solitude are all about. "

― James Lee Burke , A Private Cathedral (Dave Robicheaux #23)

13 " We’re living in weird times, Streak. I bet forty percent of the country wouldn’t mind firing up the ovens as long as the smokestacks are blowing downwind. "

― James Lee Burke , A Private Cathedral (Dave Robicheaux #23)

14 " She ran away from home at age seventeen and hooked up with three outlaw bikers who gang-raped her on the way to Sturgis. She had an abortion in Memphis and spent three months in jail for soliciting at a truck stop on I-40. The next two stops were Big D and New Orleans and runway gigs with a G-string and pasties, then Acapulco and Vegas with oilmen who could buy Third World countries with their credit cards. Miami was even more lucrative. She went to work for a former CIA agent turned political operative who set up cameras in hotel rooms and blackmailed corporate executives and Washington insiders. She helped destroy careers and lives and woke up one morning next to the corpse of a married man who died from an overdose in his sleep and whose family she had to face at the police station. One week later, she swallowed half a bottle of downers, turned on the gas in the oven, and stuck her head in. Three weeks later, she slashed her wrists. One month after that, she helped a pimp roll a blind man. It’s not the kind of personal history you forget. "

― James Lee Burke , A Private Cathedral (Dave Robicheaux #23)

15 " reread James Street’s Tap Roots and By Valour and Arms, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, MacKinlay Kantor’s Andersonville, Bruce Catton’s A Stillness at Appomattox, and all the works of Shelby Foote. "

― James Lee Burke , A Private Cathedral (Dave Robicheaux #23)

16 " Maybe they used drugs on you. Maybe they didn’t need drugs. They have powers we don’t understand. "

― James Lee Burke , A Private Cathedral (Dave Robicheaux #23)

17 " motivation may be no more complex than that of an angry child flinging scat because he was left with regularity in a dirty diaper. "

― James Lee Burke , A Private Cathedral (Dave Robicheaux #23)

18 " drug and alcohol addiction are joined at the hip with clinical depression and psychoneurotic anxiety. "

― James Lee Burke , A Private Cathedral (Dave Robicheaux #23)

19 " Penelope Balangie’s tom-toms. For a minute or two I thought my magic twanger was shifting into overdrive. "

― James Lee Burke , A Private Cathedral (Dave Robicheaux #23)

20 " Her hair smelled like the Caribbean. "

― James Lee Burke , A Private Cathedral (Dave Robicheaux #23)