James Lee Burke Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
More James Lee Burke quote about:
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“I believe every...man remembers the girl he thinks he should have married. She reappears to him in his lonely moments, or he sees her in the face of a young girl in the park, buying a snowball under an oak tree by the baseball diamond. But she belongs to back there, to somebody else, and that thought sometimes rends your heart in a way that you never share with anyone else.”
-- James Lee Burke -
“I used to save all my rejection slips because I told myself, one day I'm going to autograph these and auction them. And then I lost the box.”
-- 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 -
“If we break promises to God, shouldn't we be allowed an occasional violation of our word to our friends and superiors?”
-- James Lee Burke -
“There's nothing like rejection to make you do an inventory of yourself.”
-- James Lee Burke -
“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 -
“Humility is not a virtue in a writer, it is an absolute necessity.”
-- James Lee Burke -
“There is no higher form of artistic expression then film”
-- James Lee Burke -
“It has been my experience that most human stories are circular rather than linear. Regardless of the path we choose, we somehow end up where we commenced - in part, I suspect, because the child who lives in us goes along for the ride.”
-- James Lee Burke -
“When people make a contract with the devil and give him an air-conditioned office to work in, he doesn't go back home easily.”
-- James Lee Burke -
“That's one of the great advantages of age. You can say, I don't want to, I don't care, you can throw temper tantrums, and nobody minds.”
-- James Lee Burke -
“Every rejection is incremental payment on your dues that in some way will be translated back into your work.”
-- James Lee Burke -
“Hackberry Holland's greatest fear was his fellow man's propensity to act collectively, in militaristic lockstep, under the banner of God and country. Mobs did not rush across town to do good deeds, and in Hackberry's view, there was no more odious taint on any social or political endeavor than universal approval.”
-- James Lee Burke -
“Why do I always feel like you're trying to staple my umbilical cord to the corner of your desk?”
-- James Lee Burke -
“In the alluvial sweep of the land, I thought I could see the past and the present and the future all at once, as though time were not sequential in nature but took place without a beginning or an end, like a flash of green light rippling outward from the center of creation, not unlike a dream inside the mind of God.”
-- James Lee Burke -
“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 -
“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 -
“Louisiana is a fresh-air mental asylum.”
-- James Lee Burke -
“How do you explain to yourself the casual manner in which you threw your life away?”
-- James Lee Burke -
“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 -
“Then the sun broke above the crest of the hills and the entire countryside looked soaked in blood, the arroyos deep in shadow, the cones of dead volcanoes stark and biscuit-colored against the sky. I could smell pinion trees, wet sage, woodsmoke, cattle in the pastures, and creek water that had melted from snow. I could smell the way the country probably was when it was only a dream in the mind of God.”
-- James Lee Burke -
“A lie is an act of theft. It steals peoples faith and makes them resent themselves”
-- James Lee Burke -
“I sometimes subscribe to the belief that all historical events occur simultaneously, like a dream in the mind of God. Perhaps it is only man who views time sequentially and tries to impose a solar calendar upon it. What if other people, both dead and unborn, are living out their lives in the same space we occupy, without our knowledge or consent?" The Glass Rainbow, p. 138”
-- James Lee Burke -
“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 -
“THE ALLURE OF Montana is like a commitment to a narcotic; you can never use it up or get enough of it. Its wilderness areas probably resemble the earth on the first day of creation.”
-- James Lee Burke -
“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.”
-- James Lee Burke -
“But perhaps age has taught me that the earth is still new, molten at the core and still forming, that black leaves in the winter forest will crawl with life in the spring, that our story is ongoing and it is indeed a crime to allow the heart's energies to dissipate with the fading of light on the horizon.”
-- James Lee Burke -
“If you don't compromise your gift, if you write each day as well as you can, and then submit your work and not worry about it and go on to the next piece, you suddenly find oddly enough that you're no more interested in the applause than the silence. You don't hear either one of them. You can never listen to the naysayers. If you do you won't survive.”
-- James Lee Burke
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