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Creole Belle
James Lee Burke
Top 10 Best Quotes
“I also believe my home state is cursed by ignorance and poverty and racism, much of it deliberately inculcated to control a vulnerable electorate. And I believe many of the politicians in Louisiana are among the most stomach-churning examples of white trash and venality I have ever known. To me, the fact that large numbers of people find them humorously picaresque is mind numbing, on a level with telling fond tales of one's rapist.”
“I'm over the hill for come-on lines. On a quiet day, I can hear my liver rotting. For exercise, I fall down. ~ Clete”
“No one likes to be afraid. Fear is the enemy of love & faith & it robs us of our sleep & our sunrise & makes us treacherous & venal& fills our glands with toxins & effaces our identity & gives flight to any vestige of self respect. If you have ever been afraid, truly afraid, in a way that makes your hair soggy with sweat & turns your skin gray & fouls your blood & spiritually eviscerates you to the point you cannot pray, lest your prayers be a concession to your conviction that you're about to die, you know what I am talking about. If you do not have the option of either fleeing or attacking your adversary, your level of fear will grow to the point where you feel like your skin is being stripped from your bones.”
“The Gulf Stream waters of Woody Guthrie's famous song were strung with columns of oil that were several miles long.”
“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.”
“The air smelled like Bayou Teche when it's spring and the fish are spawning among the water hyacinths and the frogs are throbbing in the cattails and the flooded cypress.”
“You just got sprung." "Nig Rosewater out there?" Clete asked. "Nig Rosewater hasn't been up at this hour since World War II.”
“Varina was breathing hard through her nose, her face pinched, not unlike a child’s. “You don’t know how mad you can make people,” she said. “I had tender feelings for you once, whether you knew it or not. But you’re a shit, Dave Robicheaux.”
“wondered how many young men had wakened in the middle of the night, trying to sort out Varina’s mood swings and the conscious or unconscious signals she sent regarding her affections. I also wondered how many of them woke in the morning throbbing with desire and went to their jobs resenting themselves for emotions they couldn’t control. I thought Varina caused her lovers heartbreak because they believed there was nothing false or manipulative in her nature. They saw a loveliness and innocence in her that reminded them of dreams they’d had in adolescence about an imaginary girl, one who was so pretty and decent and good that they never told others about her or allowed themselves to think inappropriately of her.”
“when it comes to understanding the mysteries of creation or the fact that light can enter the eye and form an image in the brain and send a poetic tendril down the arm into a clutch of fingers that could write the Shakespearean sonnets.”
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Book Keywords:
pick-up-lines, aging, fear, america, politics, louisiana, oil-spill, humor, hurricane-katrina, warfare, nature