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

...and I wonder if there is any way to adequately describe the folly that causes us to undo all the great gifts of both Earth and Heaven.

— James Lee Burke

And like most middle-aged people who hear the clock ticking in their lives, I had come to resent a waste or theft of my time that was greater than any theft of my goods or money.

— James Lee Burke

As a revolutionary people, we Americans won a probable victory over the best and biggest army in the world because we learned to fight from the Indians. You can do a lot of damage with a Kentucky rifle from behind a tree. You don't put on a peaked hat and a red coat and white leggings and crossed white bandoleers with a big silver buckle in the center of the X and march uphill into a line of Howitzers loaded with chain and chopped horseshoes.

— James Lee Burke

As I was to learn, patience and latitude and even humility are, paradoxically, the handmaidens of wealth, because virtue is costly only for those who own nothing else.

— James Lee Burke

But no one could say he hadn't gotten even. He could not count the field women whom he had sexually degraded and demoralized and in whom he had left his seed, so their bastard children would be a daily visual reminder of what a plantation white man could do to a plantation black woman whenever he wanted, nor could he count the black men whom he had made fear his blackjack as they would fear Satan himself, making each of them a lifetime enemy of all white people.

— James Lee Burke

Humility is not a virtue in a writer, it is an absolute necessity.

— James Lee Burke

If there is any human tragedy, there is only one, and it occurs when we forget who we are and remain silent while a stranger takes up residence inside our skin.

— James Lee Burke

. . . I had found the edge. The place where you unstrap all your fastenings to the earth, to what you are what you have been, where you flame out on the edge of the spheres, and the sun and moon become eclipsed and the world below is as dead and remote and without interest as if it were glazed with ice.

— James Lee Burke

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