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If you put somebody on a crack pipe and give them a 9 mm Baretta, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what's going to happen next.

James Lee Burke

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James Lee Burke
Age: 88
Born: 1936
Born: December 5
Author
Novelist
Writer
Houston
Texas
Figures
Somebody
Rocket
Happen
Rockets
Next
Pipe
Happens
Crack
Give
Cracks
Giving
Scientist
Going
Figure

More quotes by James Lee Burke

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Success, like fashion, is a fickle companion and can leave one in the wink of an eye.
James Lee Burke
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I could only wonder again at the white race's naïveté in always sending forth our worst members as our emissaries.
James Lee Burke
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One day you'll have a quiet heart.
James Lee Burke
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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
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Every rejection is incremental payment on your dues that in some way will be translated back into your work.
James Lee Burke
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God bless the Reference Librarians
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I believe the causes that create them [serial killers] are theological in nature, rather than societal. I believe they make a conscious choice to erase God's thumbprint from their souls.
James Lee Burke
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I think the crime novel has replaced the sociological novel of the 1930s. I think the progenitor of that tradition is James M. Cain, who in my view is the most neglected writer in American literature.
James Lee Burke
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Louisiana is a fresh-air mental asylum.
James Lee Burke
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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
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To misuse one's talent, to be cavalier about it, to set it aside because of fear or sloth is unpardonable.
James Lee Burke
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We gain no wisdom by imposing our way on others.
James Lee Burke
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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
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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
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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
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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
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We all end up in the same place. Some sonner than others.
James Lee Burke
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There's nothing like rejection to make you do an inventory of yourself.
James Lee Burke
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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
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The real gladiators of the world are so humble in their origins and unremarkable in appearance that when we stand next to them in a grocery-store line, we never guess how brightly their souls can burn in the dark.
James Lee Burke