Quotes from Turning Angel

“Just because you will not see the work completed does not mean you are free not to take it up.”
― Greg Iles, quote from Turning Angel

“When you drive down Cemetery Road, the angel appears to be looking directly at you. Yet once you pass the monument and look back over your shoulder, the angel is still looking at you. Thus the appellation: the Turning Angel.”
― Greg Iles, quote from Turning Angel

“But as my mother always said: You never know what’s cooking in someone else’s pot.”
― Greg Iles, quote from Turning Angel

“A man walks the straight and narrow all his life; he follows the rules, stays within the lines; then one day he makes a misstep. He crosses a line and sets in motion a chain of events that will take from him everything he has and damn him forever in the eyes of those he loves.”
― Greg Iles, quote from Turning Angel

“Looking down the road that runs along the bluff, I spy a solitary figure in the rain. The Turning Angel.”
― Greg Iles, quote from Turning Angel

“Quentin finishes with the limb and sits up. “Who wears the pants in your family, man?” “That depends on the issue.”
― Greg Iles, quote from Turning Angel

“He did say something about my butt once.” “What?” “No way.” “Come on.” “God.” She bowed her head as though mortified. “He said I had a ghetto bootie.” I grabbed the wheel to keep us on the road. “Meaning?” “You know…a butt like a black chick.” I laughed at Mia’s expression of mixed embarrassment and amusement. “Do you have one?” “You tell me.” “Yeah, you kind of do.” She burst out laughing. “It is a good one, though, I’ll admit that.” “It better be,” she said. “I work on it enough.”
― Greg Iles, quote from Turning Angel

“Mia’s eyes for too long would send me straight down the road Drew has already traveled. The reality of a stunningly beautiful and intelligent young woman explaining why it’s all right for you to make love to her is enough to make any male lose all capacity for rational thought. In my mind I hear Wade Anders telling me that the hardest thing he ever did was turn down the girls who’ve come on to him in his office. Those girls, I am certain, were not even in Mia’s league.”
― Greg Iles, quote from Turning Angel

“But what refuses to leave my mind is the image of Drew and Kate making love before the camera. Mia viewed that photograph with me and felt no embarrassment at all. On the contrary, she wants to experience the same intensity she saw there with me. More than that, she’s telling me beforehand that I’ll have no obligation to her. Evolutionary nirvana, Caitlin called it. God, was she right.”
― Greg Iles, quote from Turning Angel

“Of course you have. I’m a man, and I respond to all that you are. But I also feel things that a father feels for a daughter. Mainly, I feel very protective of you. And my first duty is to protect you from me.”
― Greg Iles, quote from Turning Angel

“When drug dealers get killed—black or white—the public perception is that the victims simply got what was coming to them. When a young girl is raped and murdered—black or white—our knowledge of the primitive laws of attraction and male sexual dominance informs our response. But when middle-aged white people minding their own business are murdered in their home in the safest part of town, the fundamental order of Southern life is thrown out of balance.”
― Greg Iles, quote from Turning Angel

“some harsher truths: that the world they will find beyond the borders of Mississippi looks very different from the one that nurtured them to this point; that the whites among them might soon find themselves the targets of prejudice for a change;”
― Greg Iles, quote from Turning Angel

“Where are you going?” Quentin asks. “To do my job. You need to start thinking about whether you’ve got what it takes to do yours.” “Hey, don’t—” I slam the door and hurry down the hall. The Brightside Manor Apartments stand like a visual reprimand to every liberal fantasy of government-subsidized housing. The dilapidated buildings look like sets built for a Blaxploitation flick from the seventies, like you could walk up and push them down with your foot. Thirteen big saltboxes grouped on the edge of St. Catherine’s Creek, all centered around a massive square of asphalt crowded with one of the strangest collections of motor transportation in the nation.”
― Greg Iles, quote from Turning Angel

“Some stories must wait to be told. Any writer worth his salt knows this. Sometimes you wait for events to percolate in your subconscious until a deeper truth emerges; other times you’re simply waiting for the principals to die. Sometimes it’s both. This story is like that.”
― Greg Iles, quote from Turning Angel

“At least fifty people are sitting or standing within sight of me. The oldest ones sit on their stoops beneath dented metal awnings. The middle-aged stand in little knots, the men sharing bottles wrapped in paper sacks, the women holding babies. I don’t see any teenagers—it’s as though they’ve been drafted for some special war—but several toddlers walk unsupervised through the parking lot. Three of them are naked.”
― Greg Iles, quote from Turning Angel

“Now it turns out he was having sex with his babysitter, and they’re so pissed off they’re about to pop. But their anger’s not really about Kate, you know? It’s about them. They feel betrayed. They put him up on a pedestal, and then he committed the crime of being human. So fuck him, right? Never mind that Kate was two weeks shy of eighteen, and on the make for exactly the kind of affair she had with Drew.”
― Greg Iles, quote from Turning Angel

“The naïveté of human beings is truly breathtaking”
― Greg Iles, quote from Turning Angel

“You want the party line or the real answer?” “You know what I want.” His eyes shine as he shakes his head. “Penn, these girls…they’re not the girls we went to school with, okay? There’s a group of girls here who have a club called the Bald Eagles. Know why?” “Do I want to know?” “They all shave their pussies.” “Is that a big deal?” Wade raises his eyebrows. “They’re in the eighth grade.” “Jesus.” Even in our frankest discussions, Mia and I have not gotten to this level of detail. “And the juniors and seniors? Man, they put it right in your face. Day in and day out. Sex is no big deal to them. I’ll be honest with you, Penn, the hardest thing I’ve ever done is said no to the girls who’ve come on to me in this office. I’ve had ’em start changing clothes right in front of me, like they forgot I was here, then ask if I want to see more.” Wade’s honesty surprises me. But is he playing me as well? “Do you always say no, Wade?” His jaw tightens. “Yessir, I do. Know why?” “Why?” “My mama taught me one lesson. Don’t shit where you eat.” He glances at the door again. “I need this job, Penn. And screwing a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old would eventually lose it for me. Because these girls can’t handle what they’re playing with. They have sex, but they don’t understand what it really is,”
― Greg Iles, quote from Turning Angel

“When you start talking to yourself in a graveyard, it’s time to go home.”
― Greg Iles, quote from Turning Angel

“he committed such a heinous act, would have owned up to it and taken his punishment like a man, as the archaic phrase goes. That may be a quaint and sexist notion these days, but some of what is best about the South is archaic. The tragedy is that it should be so.”
― Greg Iles, quote from Turning Angel

“her? I wonder. “Tom?” I say, taking advantage of”
― Greg Iles, quote from Turning Angel

“People say time be like a river. That’s bullshit. You can swim upstream and downstream in a river. Can you do that with time? Hell, no. Time ain’t no river. Time is a big fucking razor blade scraping across the universe. And the edge of that razor is now. See? That’s all there is, man. No upstream or down, no past or future—just now. And all the stuff we feel, like hoping and feeling sorry for shit, that’s nothing. Useless. Nothing matters in this world but now.”
― Greg Iles, quote from Turning Angel

“But now that I’ve seen the reality up close, I understand white frustration. Black people here are just different. Not all of them, but so many. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because this was one of the biggest slaveholding cotton counties along the river. I don’t know. I used to think it was ignorance, but I’m starting to see it as willful ignorance, and maybe worse.”
― Greg Iles, quote from Turning Angel

“Their belligerence in public places, their rudeness…there’s almost a pride in ignorance here. Black employees refuse to wait on white customers in stores. They treat incompetence as though it’s some kind of act of civil disobedience. I’m sick of it, Penn.”
― Greg Iles, quote from Turning Angel

“And the black politicians…my God. I’ve watched black aldermen do patently illegal things and then brag about it. They don’t care whether something is legal or not.” “White politicians abused the system for years, Caitlin. They just did it in a more subtle way.” “I know that. But is that an excuse for blacks to repeat the abuses of the old system? The system Martin Luther King and Malcolm X died to dismantle?”
― Greg Iles, quote from Turning Angel

“CNN, okay? They came at night and beat down the doors. All”
― Greg Iles, quote from Turning Angel

“The system is broken! And one of the reasons it’s broken down here is that it’s largely run by and for black people. They simply do not place a high cultural value on education, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise any longer.” I can’t believe it. Like so many Yankee transplants, Caitlin has had a dramatic change of heart on the issue of race. But though I’ve seen it before, I would never have expected it from her. “That’s a pretty racist view, Caitlin.” “I’m not a racist,” she asserts. “I’m a realist.” “If I said those things, I’d be labeled a racist. Does being from Boston make it all right for you to espouse those views?”
― Greg Iles, quote from Turning Angel

“Caitlin is right, although her argument would probably offend every woman on the jury.”
― Greg Iles, quote from Turning Angel

“And a man who does nothing during a crisis is as bad as a man who causes one.”
― Greg Iles, quote from Turning Angel

“some of what she said actually offended me. Caitlin truly was a liberal when she arrived in Natchez, and she routinely chastised me for being too conservative. But now it seems that her liberal “convictions” weren’t convictions at all, but rather easy opinions based on the lectures of Ivy League professors. After a few years in the South, she’s ready to give up on racial harmony and flee to more “enlightened”—read homogenous—environs.”
― Greg Iles, quote from Turning Angel

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