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The New Iberia Blues (Dave Robicheaux #22) QUOTES

The New Iberia Blues (Dave Robicheaux #22) QUOTES

41 " At a certain time in your life, you accept the fact that lunacy comes in many forms. "

― James Lee Burke , The New Iberia Blues (Dave Robicheaux #22)

42 " Besides, isn’t it better to let evil die inside its own flame? "

― James Lee Burke , The New Iberia Blues (Dave Robicheaux #22)

43 " I was not simply tired of the world’s iniquity. I was tired of greed in particular and the ostentatious display of wealth that characterizes our times, and the justifications for despoiling the earth and injuring our fellow man. "

― James Lee Burke , The New Iberia Blues (Dave Robicheaux #22)

44 " What we do is punish the people who are available,” she said. "

― James Lee Burke , The New Iberia Blues (Dave Robicheaux #22)

45 " symbolize the ruinous consequence of America’s decision to abandon the republic that the entire world admired and loved. "

― James Lee Burke , The New Iberia Blues (Dave Robicheaux #22)

46 " But the past is the past, and you don’t get it back. "

― James Lee Burke , The New Iberia Blues (Dave Robicheaux #22)

47 " I still wanted to believe George Orwell’s admonition that people are always better than we think they are. "

― James Lee Burke , The New Iberia Blues (Dave Robicheaux #22)

48 " Did you ever see a mob rush across town to do a good deed? "

― James Lee Burke , The New Iberia Blues (Dave Robicheaux #22)

49 " and made famous by Janis Joplin. It was one of despair and loss and unrelieved misery, one that maybe only a black woman of Thornton’s era could adequately understand. The song was “Ball and Chain. "

― James Lee Burke , The New Iberia Blues (Dave Robicheaux #22)

50 " In Montana I knew a twenty-one-year-old kid who killed two people before he got to prison, then killed or helped kill five more during a riot. He had to be awakened from a sound sleep the afternoon of his execution. The "

― James Lee Burke , The New Iberia Blues (Dave Robicheaux #22)

51 " If we get scared enough we can convince ourselves that snake and nape are selective, and that a scarlet cross painted on a shield can make acceptable the beheadings of Saracens on a scaffold in Jerusalem. "

― James Lee Burke , The New Iberia Blues (Dave Robicheaux #22)

52 " That postage stamp of a moment has always remained with me as a reminder of the innocent world in which I grew up. Or at least the innocent world in which we chose to live, perhaps to our regret. When I sat under the tree at three in the morning, an old man watching a barge and tug working its way upstream, I knew that I no longer had to reclaim the past, that the past was still with me, inextricably part of my soul and who I was; I could step through a hole in the dimension and be with my father and mother again, and I didn’t have to drink or mourn the dead or live on a cross for my misdeeds; I was set free, and the past and the future and the present were at the ends of my fingertips, filled with promise and goodness, and I didn’t have to submit to time or fate or even mortality. The party is a grand one and infinite in nature and like the music of the spheres thunderous in its presence, and I realized finally that the invitation to it comes with the sunrise and a clear eye and a good heart and the knowledge that we’re already inside eternity and need not fear any longer. "

― James Lee Burke , The New Iberia Blues (Dave Robicheaux #22)

53 " There is a subculture in this country that seems to have no antecedent—a conflation of reality television, National Enquirer journalism, fundamentalist religion, militarism, and professional football. At the center is an adoration of celebrity, no matter how it is acquired or in what form it comes. Women "

― James Lee Burke , The New Iberia Blues (Dave Robicheaux #22)

54 " For good or bad, my preoccupation with death and the past had defined much of my life, and a long time ago I had made my separate peace with the world and abandoned any claim on reason or normalcy or the golden mean. Waylon Jennings said it many years ago: I’ve always been crazy but it’s kept me from going insane. "

― James Lee Burke , The New Iberia Blues (Dave Robicheaux #22)

55 " a circuitous way of spreading confusion without offering any information of value. "

― James Lee Burke , The New Iberia Blues (Dave Robicheaux #22)

56 " I could have written the entire incident off, but any time three people report a scream, they’re calling not about a sound but about a memory that lives in the collective unconscious, one that goes back to the cave. When we are alarmed to the degree that we have to tell others about it, we’re dipping into a primal knowledge about the darker potential of the gene pool. Or at least this has always been my belief. "

― James Lee Burke , The New Iberia Blues (Dave Robicheaux #22)

57 " Evil has an odor. It’s a presence that consumes its host. We deny it because we don’t have an acceptable explanation for it. It smells like decay inside living tissue. "

― James Lee Burke , The New Iberia Blues (Dave Robicheaux #22)

58 " I had no plan in mind. However, that statement is one I have always distrusted in other people, and I distrust it even more when I think it or say it myself. The unconscious always knows what the person is doing or planning. The agenda is to find the situation and the rationale that will allow the individual to commit deeds that are unconscionable. No matter how you cut it, I was back to the short form of the Serenity Prayer, known in AA and other recovery groups as Fuck It. "

― James Lee Burke , The New Iberia Blues (Dave Robicheaux #22)

59 " I knew I had entered a new season in my life, one that had nothing to do with rotations of the earth. It’s the season when you accept your fate and give up fear and worry and end your lover’s quarrel with the world and follow the foot tracks of hominids into a place that is perhaps already at the tips of your fingers. When that happens to you, you’ll know it, and if you’re wise, you will not try to explain it to others, any more than you would try to explain light to a man born without sight. "

― James Lee Burke , The New Iberia Blues (Dave Robicheaux #22)

60 " the men who break in and steal by night, who spread self-doubt and fear and acrimony, will eventually fall by the wayside and be unremembered ciphers that disappear like scraps of newspaper in our rearview mirror. "

― James Lee Burke , The New Iberia Blues (Dave Robicheaux #22)