{"author":"James Lee Burke","author_id":"James+Lee+Burke","total_quotes":19,"quotes":[{"text":"Some people say you pick up the Dirty Boogie where you left it off. Others say you pick it up where you would have been had you never gotten off it.","author":"James Lee Burke","tags":["life-lessons"],"id":37158,"author_id":"James+Lee+Burke"},{"text":"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.","author":"James Lee Burke","tags":["courage","heartbreak","parenthood"],"id":43572,"author_id":"James+Lee+Burke"},{"text":"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.","author":"James Lee Burke","tags":["alcoholism","asp","denial","snake"],"id":43960,"author_id":"James+Lee+Burke"},{"text":". . . 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. ","author":"James Lee Burke","tags":["life","wisdom"],"id":77863,"author_id":"James+Lee+Burke"},{"text":"Humility is not a virtue in a writer, it is an absolute necessity.","author":"James Lee Burke","tags":["writing"],"id":124106,"author_id":"James+Lee+Burke"},{"text":"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.","author":"James Lee Burke","tags":["blackjack","crime","degrade","fear","hatred","oppression","plantations","racism","rape","satan","southern"],"id":132589,"author_id":"James+Lee+Burke"},{"text":"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.","author":"James Lee Burke","tags":["aging","humor","pick-up-lines"],"id":146233,"author_id":"James+Lee+Burke"},{"text":"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.","author":"James Lee Burke","tags":["writing"],"id":164204,"author_id":"James+Lee+Burke"},{"text":"Louisiana is a fresh-air mental asylum.","author":"James Lee Burke","tags":["humor","insanity","louisiana"],"id":215163,"author_id":"James+Lee+Burke"},{"text":"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.","author":"James Lee Burke","tags":["poverty","virtue","wealth"],"id":222001,"author_id":"James+Lee+Burke"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":19,"pages":2,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}