Top 100 James Lee Burke Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Prosecutors often wince when they have to take a child abuser to trial, because usually the only witnesses they can use are children who are terrified at the prospect of testifying against their parents.”

— James Lee Burke

52. “The story of Ulysses and Agamemnon and Menelaus, of Jesus, of the Good Knight of Chaucer, lives in every one of us.”

— James Lee Burke

53. “Colored or not, we all pick the white man’s cotton.”

— James Lee Burke

54. “I leaned back in my chair, my fingers laced behind my head, and wondered at the complexities and contradictions that must have existed in the earth’s original clay when God first scooped it up in His palms.”

— James Lee Burke

55. “My experience has been that grief and loss do not necessarily become more acceptable with time, and commitment to them is of no value to either the living or the dead.”

— James Lee Burke

56. “Never read bad stuff if you’re an artist; it will impair your own game. I don’t know if you ever played competitive tennis, but you learn not to watch bad tennis; it messes up your game. Art’s the same way.”

— James Lee Burke

57. “Most criminals are stupid. They creep $500,000 homes in the Garden District, load up two dozen bottles of gin, whiskey, vermouth, and Collins mix in a $2,000 Irish linen tablecloth and later drink the booze and throw the tablecloth away.”

— James Lee Burke

58. “Never read bad stuff if you’re an artist; it will impair your own game.”

— James Lee Burke

59. “There are certain kinds of currency you acquire in life. Most of it is ephemeral. But friendship and faith in the unseen world and the commitment to be true unto thine own self are the human glue that you never give up, not for any reason.”

— James Lee Burke

60. “Don’t undo a brave and noble deed. Don’t rob yourself of your own virtue.”

— James Lee Burke

61. “The best moments in life are not the kind many historians record.”

— James Lee Burke

62. “Don’t let anyone tell you that age purchases your freedom from fear of death.”

— James Lee Burke

63. “There are not many places left in the United States where people can get off the computer, stop filing tax returns, and in effect become invisible. The rain forests in the Cascades and parts of West Montana come to mind, and perhaps the ‘Glades still offer hope to those who wish to resign from modern times. The other place is the Atchafalaya Basin.”

— James Lee Burke

64. “I wouldn’t write anything autobiographical. If you’ve lived a life like Laurence of Arabia, it might be a consideration, but otherwise it’s a little bit vain, it seems to me.”

— James Lee Burke

65. “What happens outside of us doesn’t count. That’s something we don’t have control over. It’s what we do with it, the way that we react to it, that’s important.”

— James Lee Burke

66. “The human spirit is frail. People believe whatever they need to believe. I feel sorry for all of them.”

— James Lee Burke

67. “I had to feel sorry for Bubba’s wife. In AA we called it denial. We take the asp to our breast and smile at the alarm we see in the eyes of others.”

— James Lee Burke

68. “And I suppose that what I have learned is a lesson that the years, or self-concern, had begun to hide from me, namely, that the bravest and most loyal and loving people in the world seldom have heroic physical characteristics or the auras of saints. In fact, their faces are like those of people whom you might randomly pull out of a supermarket line, their physical makeup so nondescript and unremarkable that it’s hard to remember what they look like ten minutes after they walk out of a room.”

— James Lee Burke

69. “I looked at Lucas with the pang that a parent feels when he knows his child will be hurt and that it’s no one’s fault and that to try to preempt the rites of passage is an act of contempt for the child’s courage.”

— James Lee Burke

70. “All drunks, particularly those who grew up in alcoholic homes, have that same sense of angst and trepidation, one that has no explainable origins. The fear is not necessarily self-centered, either. It’s like watching someone point a revolver at his temple while he cocks and dry-fires the mechanism, over and over again, until the cylinder rotates a loaded chamber into firing position.”

— James Lee Burke

71. “Cruelty and sentimentality are almost always companion characteristics in an individual but never cruelty and love.”

— James Lee Burke

72. “We decry violence all the time in this country, but look at our history. We were born in a violent revolution, and we’ve been in wars ever since. We’re not a pacific people.”

— James Lee Burke

73. “If you have attended the dying, you know what their last moments are like. They anticipate the separation of themselves from the world of the living before you do, and they accept it with dignity and without complaint.”

— James Lee Burke

74. “If you’re wired a certain way, you’ll always be in morion, clicking to your own rhythm, all of it in four-four time, avoiding convention and predictability and control as you would a sickness, the whole world waiting for you like an enormous dance pavilion lit by colored lights and surrounded with palm trees. I’m not talking about the dirty boogie. The music of the spheres is right outside your bedroom window.”

— James Lee Burke

75. “My experience has been that people who die for causes have few friends in death.”

— James Lee Burke

76. “Is there a design in the events of our lives? Or do things just happen, much like a junk yard falling down a staircase? If it’s the latter, how do you deal with it?”

— James Lee Burke

77. “Why do I always feel like you’re trying to staple my umbilical cord to the corner of your desk?”

— James Lee Burke

78. “In a badass, beer-glass brawl, would you rather have an academic liberal covering your back or a hobnailed redneck?”

— James Lee Burke

79. “Not everybody gets to see a blinding light on the way to Damascus.”

— James Lee Burke

80. “Mexico was not a country, Krill thought. It was a revolution that had never stopped.”

— James Lee Burke

81. “No matter what occurs in your life, no matter how bad the circumstances seem to be, you must never consider a dishonorable act as a viable alternative.”

— James Lee Burke

82. “You do it a day at a time. You write as well as you can, you put it in the mail, you leave it under submission, you never leave it at home.”

— James Lee Burke

83. “Tomorrow has no more existence than yesterday, but you can always control now. We live in a series of nows. Think about now.”

— James Lee Burke

84. “It’s a great burden, being one of the good guys.”

— James Lee Burke

85. “Then she walked away, like Helen of Troy turning her back on Attica. A gust of warm wind blew newspapers along the boulevard into the sky. The light was orange and bleeding out of the clouds in the west, the horizon darkening, the waves crashing on the beach just the other side of Seawall Boulevard, the palm trees rattling dryly in the wind. I could smell the salt and the seaweed and the tiny shellfish that had dried on the beach, like the smell of birth. I.”

— James Lee Burke

86. “Deviants and monsters ran the camps where families were sent up the chimney or turned into bars of soap, but they would have been powerless without the clerks who sat anonymously behind typewriters and gave them bureaucratic legitimacy.”

— James Lee Burke

87. “I had learned long ago that resolution by itself is not enough; we are what we do, not what we think and feel.”

— James Lee Burke

88. “How do you caution a fawn about a cigarette a motorist has just flipped from his car window into a patch of yellow grass, or tell a sparrow that winged creatures eventually plummet to earth?”

— James Lee Burke

89. “Cancer and lightning go where they want. So does political corruption.”

— James Lee Burke

90. “I wanted to believe he was mad. Unfortunately, I no longer knew what madness was.”

— James Lee Burke

91. “Baptized Christians ran the ovens in the camps.”

— James Lee Burke

92. “There are those who are made different in the womb.”

— James Lee Burke

93. “The reason people don’t buy conspiracy theories is they think ‘conspiracy’ means everybody’s on the same program. That’s not how it works. Everybody’s got a different program. They just all want the same guy dead. Socrates was a gadfly, but I bet he took time out to screw somebody’s wife.”

— James Lee Burke

94. “Hope was the light that allowed man to prevail in the worst of circumstances. But it also could become the narcotic of the self-deluded and the naive.”

— James Lee Burke

95. “Neither our own passing nor the passing of an era is a tragedy, no matter how much we would like to think it is.”

— James Lee Burke

96. “There’s enough evil in the human heart to incinerate the earth.”

— James Lee Burke

97. “And every good artist knows that the gift comes from somewhere else, and it’s there for a reason, and that’s to make the world a better place.”

— James Lee Burke

98. “The wrong people always worry. The people who are the real problem never worry about anything.”

— James Lee Burke

99. “When you love somebody, you give up making decisions just for yourself.”

— James Lee Burke

100. “Write for the love of your art. Someplace down the road, the money, the fame, they’ll come, but by that time you won’t be thinking in terms of money or fame.”

— James Lee Burke