Home > Work > Purple Cane Road (Dave Robicheaux, #11)
1 " I returned to New Orleans and my problems with pari-mutuel windows and a dark-haired, milk-skinned wife from Martinique who went home with men from the Garden District while I was passed out in a houseboat on Lake Pontchartrain, the downdraft of U.S. Army helicopters flattening a plain of elephant grass in my dreams. "
― James Lee Burke , Purple Cane Road (Dave Robicheaux, #11)
2 " I told myself I did not have to live as I once did. I did not have to re-create the violent moments that used to come aborning like a sulfurous match flaring off a thumbnail. "
3 " Then I saw the consuming nature of her fear, her willingness to believe that exploitative charlatans could change her fate or really cared what happened to her, the dread and angst that congealed like a cold vapor around her heart when she awoke each morning, one day closer to the injection table at Angola. "
4 " Night Comes to the Cumberland. "
5 " I hit him so hard spittle and blood flew from his mouth onto a woman’s blouse four feet away. I drove my fist into his kidney, a blow that made his back arch as though his spine had been broken, then I hooked him with a left below the eye and drove a right cross into his jaw that knocked him across a folding table. "
6 " A wet cigarette butt clung to my cheek like a mashed cockroach. I could smell whiskey and beer in my clothes and Gable’s blood on my knuckles and I swore I could taste whiskey surging out of my stomach into my throat, like an old friend who has come back in a time of need. "
7 " Barbara Shanahan, sometimes known as Battering Ram Shanahan. She was over six feet tall and had freckles and wore her light red hair cut short and wore a blue suit with white hose. She worked hard and was a good prosecutor, and I had always wanted to like her. But she seldom smiled and she went about her job with the abrasiveness of a carpenter building coffins with a nail gun. "
8 " Then Belmont discovered the carnival world of Louisiana politics, in the way a mental patient might wander into a theme park for the insane and realize that life held more promise than he had ever dreamed.Burke, James Lee. Purple Cane Road (Dave Robicheaux Book 11) "
9 " Ernest Hemingway said chasing the past is a bum way to live your life,” the sheriff said. “He also said he never took his own advice. "
10 " You treat loss just like death. It visits everyone and you don’t let it prevail in your life. "
