Top 60 Greg Iles Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You can’t build happiness on someone else’s pain.”

— Greg Iles

2. “Our actions have consequences that last long after us, entwining the present with the future in ways we cannot begin to understand.”

— Greg Iles

3. “Jung didn’t try to separate good and evil. He knew that both exist in every human heart. He called the propensity to evil the Shadow. And he believed that trying to deny or repress the Shadow is dangerous. Because it can’t be done. He believed you have to recognize your Shadow, come to grips with it, accept it, and integrate it.”

— Greg Iles

4. “The past is never dead. It’s not even past; if it were there would be no grief or sorrow.”

— Greg Iles

5. “A man’s biggest enemy is his mouth.”

— Greg Iles

6. “Just because you will not see the work completed does not mean you are free not to take it up.”

— Greg Iles

7. “Mississippi blood is different. It’s got some river in it. Delta soil, turpentine, asbestos, cotton poison. But there’s strength in it, too. Strength that’s been beat but not broke.”

— Greg Iles

8. “Greed, apathy, hubris – even loyalty – all demand payment in the end. Storms will always come, and men will always do evil in the shadow of some other word.”

— Greg Iles

9. “The Terrible Truth is that brutality is part of human nature, and all the laws in the world can’t neuter it.”

— Greg Iles

10. “There’s no meaning to be found in tragedy. Only in our response to it.”

— Greg Iles

11. “Carl Jung’s admonition: If you bring forth what is within you, it will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, it will destroy you.”

— Greg Iles

12. “Einstein said the arrow of time flies in only one direction. Faulkner, being from Mississippi, understood the matter differently. He said the past is never dead; it’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.”

— Greg Iles

13. “Don’t keep a girl guessing too long, or she’ll find the answer somewhere else.”

— Greg Iles

14. “Her touch was as knowing and confident as her eyes, and as she focused all her attention upon me, I remembered that there is nothing so thrilling as a woman of words when she decides that the time for words is past.”

— Greg Iles

15. “I don’t really understand the world anymore. But maybe there’s some faint hope that the good people on both sides can come together.”

— Greg Iles

16. “Men fantasize about wanton women, but when they meet one, they’re paralyzed by fear.”

— Greg Iles

17. “Man is the universe becoming conscious of itself.”

— Greg Iles

18. “Some things we must pass over in silence.”

— Greg Iles

19. “It’s a grim reality, but the river towns are dying in Mississippi, by a slow exsanguination of people and talent that functions like a wasting disease.”

— Greg Iles

20. “Men of integrity and courage are rare these days.”

— Greg Iles

21. “When you drive down Cemetery Road, the angel appears to be looking directly at you. Yet once you pass the monument and look back over your shoulder, the angel is still looking at you. Thus the appellation: the Turning Angel.”

— Greg Iles

22. “But as my mother always said: You never know what’s cooking in someone else’s pot.”

— Greg Iles

23. “When a parent dies, your center of gravity is altered. Even if you lived apart from them – even if you walled yourself off from all contact – you are irrevocably lessened by their passing. Death, like gravity, respects no barriers.”

— Greg Iles

24. “You know, the truth isn’t hard to find, if you’re willing to get your hands dirty. Truth waits just under the surface for any man brave enough to scrape a little dirt away. But most people are too afraid or too lazy to get dirty. They’re afraid to ask the right questions. The hard questions.”

— Greg Iles

25. “I will do those things which make me happy today and which I can also live with ten years from now.”

— Greg Iles

26. “When you start talking to yourself in a graveyard, it’s time to go home.”

— Greg Iles

27. “If a man lived long enough, his past would always overtake him, no matter how fast he ran or how morally he tried to live subsequently. And how men dealt with that law ultimately revealed their true natures.”

— Greg Iles

28. “We judge and punish based on facts, but facts are not truth. Facts are like a buried skeleton uncovered long after death. Truth is fluid. Truth is alive. To know the truth requires understanding, the most difficult human art. It requires seeing all things at once, forward and backward, the way God sees.”

— Greg Iles

29. “I must learn to be content with being happier than I deserve. – Jane Austen, Persuasion, paraphr.”

— Greg Iles

30. “When everything is at risk, good judgment, not haste, makes the difference between life and death. Panic is the enemy.”

— Greg Iles

31. “I have not written a perfect sentence, in the literary sense. It’s a lot easier to throw a perfect pass than to write a perfect sentence, if that sentence is meant to perform more than a mechanical function.”

— Greg Iles

32. “See Spot run!? is a perfect sentence in some ways. But I doubt the critics would say it was.”

— Greg Iles

33. “Emotions are by nature amorphous. When confined to words, our longings and passions, our rebellions and humiliations often seem melodramatic, trivial, or even pathetic.”

— Greg Iles

34. “A man walks the straight and narrow all his life; he follows the rules, stays within the lines; then one day he makes a misstep. He crosses a line and sets in motion a chain of events that will take from him everything he has and damn him forever in the eyes of those he loves.”

— Greg Iles

35. “Any person who wants to govern the world is by definition the wrong person to do it.”

— Greg Iles

36. “Marrying someone you don’t love is a sin. Because it sends both of you to hell. It destroys the other person first, but in the end it gets you, too. The magnitude of what you’ve done, the damage you’ve caused by forcing you both to live a lie.”

— Greg Iles

37. “You never wear red to no funeral; red says the dead person was a fool.”

— Greg Iles

38. “Only in the shadow of death do we sense the true velocity of time – while adrenaline blasts through our systems, eternity becomes tangible and all else blurs into background.”

— Greg Iles

39. “To all those adults who return home to repay the debt of childhood, and find they never really left. Listen while you still can.”

— Greg Iles

40. “Experiences are like hoarded gold. Whenever I dole out a piece of my private suffering, that is when I get letters from all over the world.”

— Greg Iles

41. “For nothing is lost, nothing is ever lost. There is always the clue, the canceled check, the smear of lipstick, the footprint in the canna bed, the condom on the park path, the twitch in the old wound, the baby shoes dipped in bronze, the taint in the blood stream. And all times are one time, and all those dead in the past never lived before our definition gives them life, and out of the shadow their eyes implore us. – Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men.”

— Greg Iles

42. “A man lives morally all his life, then in one weak moment commits an act that damns him in his own eyes and threatens his liberty, even his life.”

— Greg Iles

43. “You yourself are guilty of a crime when you do not punish crime.”

— Greg Iles

44. “The faith of children is an awesome thing to behold. If only we could all be worthy of it.”

— Greg Iles

45. “Sooner or later. It had better be sooner. Later is like the horizon; it recedes as you approach.”

— Greg Iles

46. “But fear and danger aren’t always directly proportional. We’re all terrified by rattlesnakes, but the spider we brush off our sleeve with hardly a thought is far more likely to hurt us.”

— Greg Iles

47. “Southern women don’t show their pain to anybody. They aren’t raised that way. But they feel it.”

— Greg Iles

48. “The evil prosper, and the innocent pay the bills for them.”

— Greg Iles

49. “Looking down the road that runs along the bluff, I spy a solitary figure in the rain. The Turning Angel.”

— Greg Iles

50. “The female memory defies explanation.”

— Greg Iles