Heaven's Prisoners Quotes
"But the sky had been streaked with red at dawn, and I knew that by afternoon thunderheads would roll out of the south, the temperature would suddenly drop twenty degrees, as though all the air had suddenly been sucked out from under an enormous dark bowl, and the blackened sky would tremble with trees of lightning."
"I had always loved the Gulf, no matter if it was torn with storms or if the surf was actually frozen with green ridges of ice."
"She had a tan even in winter, and the smoothest skin I had ever touched."
"Maybe I had grown foolish, or perhaps fond is a better word, in the way that an aging animal doesn't question its seduction by youth."
"It was late afternoon and still raining when I woke to the sound of the child's crying. It was as though my sleep were disturbed by the tip of an angel's wing."
"I sat on the gallery and watched the rain fall on the bayou. The air smelled of trees, wet moss, flowers, and damp earth."
"You didn't told me about your hog in my cane, no, so I didn't mean to hurt it when I pass the tractor on its head and had to eat it, me."
"Sometimes in a strong wind the pecans would ring like grapeshot on the gallery's tin roof."
"Most government employees aren't bad guys; they're just unimaginative, they feel comfortable in a world of predictable rules, and they rarely question authority."
"The Quarter had always been like that. Jean Lafitte and his gang of cutthroats had operated out of old New Orleans and so had James Bowie, who was an illegal slave trader when he wasn't slicing people apart with his murderous knife."
"Words have no governance over either birth or death, and they never make the latter more acceptable, no matter how many times its inevitability is explained to us."
"She didn't ask what had happened to her mother; she asked instead where she had gone."
"We each held her hand and walked her up the aisle of the empty church to the scrolled metal stand of burning candles that stood before statues of Mary, Joseph, and the infant Jesus."
"Her moist eyes were bright with the red and blue glow from inside the rows of glass containers on the stand."
"It was going to be a balmy, clear day, good for bluegill and bass and sunfish, until the water became warm by mid-morning and the pools of shadow under the trees turned into mirrors of brown-yellow light."
"I had a strong feeling about where it had come from."
"Her face twitched as though I had slapped her."
"I wondered if I would ever exorcise the alcoholic succubus that seemed to live within me, its claws hooked into my soul."
"I saw the hurt in her face. Her eyes flicked away from mine, then came back again."
"Annie was washing dishes in the kitchen. I stood beside her but didn't touch her."
"Say goodbye to Shitsville, Lieutenant, you're going back alive in '65."
"That's an ice bag you feel down there. It'll take the swelling down quite a bit."
"You're not ruptured, if that's what you mean. Keep it in your pajamas a couple of nights and you'll be all right."
"I set off metal detectors at the airport sometimes."
"Hey, podna, since when did you have to hide things from me?"
"The Spanish language has a lot of words like ours."
"Everybody in town likes you and respects you, and the people up and down the bayou are the best friends anyone could have."
"You get hurt, or you see something that's wrong in the world, and all the old ways come back to you."
"Are we going to fight with each other when we have a problem?"
"I don't know what it is you're looking for, but three years of marriage to you have convinced me I don't want to be there when you find it."
"You have to confront problems, Annie. When you don't, they follow you around like pariah dogs."
"It exists because people pretend it's not there."
"Nothing. I didn't eat tonight. I thought your kitchen was open."
"I'm not always big on boyhood memories," I said.
"I'm sorry. I'm just not going to invest my life in speculating about what people can do to me."
"That should make us the happiest people in the world. Instead, we fight and worry about what hasn't happened yet."
"A lot of people do. But the guy that owns this place really is. For kicks, he heats up the wires in that monkey's cage with a cigarette lighter."
"Most people think of violence as an abstraction. It never is. It's always ugly, it always demeans and dehumanises, it always shocks and repels and leaves the witnesses to it sick and shaken. It's meant to do all these things."
"Then don't let those farts at Immigration jerk you around."
"You want Bubba Rocque. You've got a file on everybody around him. In the meantime his clowns are running loose with baseball bats."
"I think maybe you should go visit your family in Kansas and take Alafair along."
"I don't want to mess up your lunch, but aren't you bothered by the fact that maybe a bomb sent that plane down at Southwest Pass, that somebody murdered a Catholic priest and two women who were fleeing a butcher shop we helped create in El Salvador?"
"We can work through it, Dave. Every marriage has a few bad moments."
"Summer in south Louisiana has always been, to me, part of an eternal song."
"Then I saw the heat lightning flash brightly in the south, and a breeze came up suddenly and broke the moonlight apart in the water."
"I marvelled at the innocence of the era in which I had grown up."
"What was the great value in plans, anyway? I thought. A forest fire didn't have one, or a flood that buried a Kentucky town in mud, or lightning that splintered down into a sodden field and blew a farmer out of his shoes."
"The bad thing is when you make yourself alone. Don't never do that, Dave, 'cause it's like that coon chewing off its own foot when he stick it in the trap."
"I ain't got to steal white men's money," she said. "I just waits for y'all to give it to me. But it's trick, trade, or travel, honey, and it looks like you got to travel."
"If you want to meet a group of people who have a profound distrust of, and hostility toward, our legal system, don't waste your time on political radicals; interview a random selection of crime victims, and you'll probably find that they make the former group look like Utopian idealists by comparison."
"No, you're just a guy that makes impossible rules for himself. That's why you're a mess."
"I was always fascinated by the government's attempt to control political protest by the clergy in the country."
"I'm not sure what he is, Father. He used to be a drug courier and street dealer. Now he may be an informer for Immigration and Naturalisation. I'm not sure if he's moving up or down in his moral status."
"Maybe because it's unholy to wash away the blood of those we love."
"The laws of segregation were gone; kids didn't go nigger-knocking on Saturday nights; the Ku Klux Klan didn't burn crosses all over Plaquemines Parish; the demagogues like Judge Leader Perez had slipped into history."
"You never let the batter know you're afraid of him."
"But time and chance happeneth to us all, even to the lowlifes."
"You're one of those full-time good losers. You know what it takes to be a good loser? Practice."
"You're going to hurt my feelings. Has someone told you bad things about me?"
"I don't think he could. I think he'd last about three days until they had to lock him in a box and put handles on it and carry it out in the middle of an empty field."
"I believe it is the direct consequence of corporate avarice, the self-serving manipulations of politicians who wage wars but never serve in them themselves, and, perhaps worse, the indifference of those of us who know better."
"But regardless, it seemed there was nothing for it except the acceptance of another sleepless night."
"You're not a good listener. You never were. That's why one day you're going to take a big fall."
"But I feel the same way when I relive Annie's death, or remember Alafair's story about her Indian village, or review that tired old film strip from Vietnam."
"I commit myself once again to that black box that I cannot think myself out of."
"The innocent who suffer for the rest of us become anointed and loved by God in a special way; the votive candle of their lives has made them heaven's prisoners."
"A girl just gets up against the wall sometimes. You know, it was either hit on you or go back to the T-and-A circuit. I just can't cut that anymore."
"I've got a revelation for you, Minos. Homicide isn't like narcotics. Your clientele breaks the law for one reason-money. But people kill each other for all kinds of reasons, and sometimes the reasons aren't logical ones."
"I opened the largest drawer in my desk and dropped all my paperwork into it, eased the drawer shut with my shoe, signed out of the office, and went home just in time to see a taxicab leave Robin Gaddis with her suitcase on my front porch."
"I tried to tell myself that I would be only a friend to her and not her ex-lover whose heart could be so easily activated by a woman's quiet and regular breathing against his chest."
"I could feel my heart beating, feel the blood in the back of my neck and in my temples."
"All I hear from you is noise. You got something to trade, get it out of your mouth or stop bothering me."
"I felt as solitary as if I had been sitting in the bottom of a dry, cool well, with strips of silver cloud floating by against a dark sky."
"He couldn't read or write and never once traveled outside the state of Louisiana, but his heart possessed an intuitive understanding about our lives, our Cajun vision of the world, that no philosophy book could convey."
"His heart possessed an intuitive understanding about our lives, our Cajun vision of the world, that no philosophy book could convey."
"The night screw is her nephew. So guess what he tells all the boons upstairs?"
"You're giving me a bad feeling, Robicheaux. Who'd you say he confessed to killing before he died?"
"New Orleans is a lousy place in the summer, anyway. We're clear about this, aren't we?"
"Forget what I said. You look a hundred years old," he said. "Stay over in a motel tonight and give us your statement in the morning."
"That's all right. I'd better be on my way. Thank you for your courtesy," I said, and walked out into the darkness and the wind that blew over the tops of the oak trees. The night sky was full of heat lightning, like the flicker of artillery beyond a distant horizon.
"My system craved for a drink: four inches of Jim Beam straight up, with a sweating Jax draft on the side, an amber-gold rush that could light my soul for hours and even let me pretend that the serpentarium was closed forever."
"Did you eat tonight, partner?" I asked. "No, suh," he said. His face was covered with thin brown lines, like a tobacco leaf.
"The person who says otherwise is lying. But the emotional attitude you form later varies greatly among individuals. Some will keep their remorse alive and feed it as they would a living gargoyle, to assure themselves of their own humanity; others will justify it in the name of a hundred causes, and they'll reach back in moments of their own inadequacy and failure and touch again those flaming shapes that somehow made their impoverished lives historically significant."
"A bird lifts its span of wings and flies forever out of the heart."
"What chu doing this for?" His eyes were red, the lines in his face as intricate as cobwebs.
"Do you love me, Dave?" she said. I didn't answer. "Come on, Streak. Fair and square. Do you love me?" "Yes." "No, you don't. You love things about me. There's a difference. It's a big one."
"But I always feared a worse consequence for myself. One day a curious light dies in the eyes. The unblemished place where God once grasped our souls becomes permanently stained."