James Lee Burke

“The skeletons in my family's closet are so numerous they've formed a conga line.”

“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”

“There are no clean slates. The sins of the father are visited upon the son.”

“The dead are never truly gone. They are with us, whispering in our ears, in the heat of the day, in the cool of the night.”

“Evil is a presence, a force in the world. It's not a psychological aberration. It's a real thing.”

“The human heart is a dark and bloody place.”

“God's unconditional love is a very difficult concept for people to accept.”

“Any man who is not a fool knows that in the eyes of the gods we are all criminals.”

“Sometimes the most beautiful things are the most dangerous.”

“The problem with the past is that it's not finished.”

“In the end, all we have is our story.”

“The wind in the pines is the sound of God's breath.”

“A man's vanity is a nasty thing. It's a cancer that eats away at his grace and his wisdom.”

“There's a dark side to every paradise. That's the nature of things.”

“Memory is a dream that you can't let go of.”

“The best of us are haunted by the ghosts of our past.”