Quotes from Wayfaring Stranger

“The wrong people always worry. The people who are the real problem never worry about anything.”
― James Lee Burke, quote from Wayfaring Stranger

“You’ve got another problem. Like most white trash, you’re disrespectful to your betters and proud of your stupidity and ignorance.”
― James Lee Burke, quote from Wayfaring Stranger

“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.”
― James Lee Burke, quote from Wayfaring Stranger

“It was the poem that explained the nature of courage and turned the mystery of death into a heroic couplet. Ultimately, it was the poem that banished fear from the heart and transformed us from actors into participants.”
― James Lee Burke, quote from Wayfaring Stranger

“There's another way to put it. Sometimes your luck runs out and you have to accept that the life you planned was a dream written on water.”
― James Lee Burke, quote from Wayfaring Stranger

“of the story showed the four brain-destroyed women Linda Gail had shown me. The grainy transfer of the images to newsprint had made them even more macabre. The story had come off the wire in Los Angeles and was written by a gossip columnist who quoted other gossip columnists as the story’s source. The details were bizarre and prurient and unbelievable, in the way of stories from True Detective, Argosy, Saga, and Male, and because they were so unbelievable, the reader concluded they could not have been manufactured. I saw Roy’s name and Linda Gail’s and the director Jerry Fallon’s and Clara Wiseheart’s. The story was basically accurate; the prose was another matter. It was purple, full of erotic suggestion, cutesy about “love nests” and “romance in Mayheco.” But as tabloid reporting often does for no purpose other than to satisfy a lascivious readership, the article brought to light an injustice and criminal conspiracy that mainstream newspaper and radio would not have touched. In other words, the account was less one of fact than a hazy description of infidelity, a movie set that had turned into the Baths of Caracalla, a young starlet seduced by”
― James Lee Burke, quote from Wayfaring Stranger

“There are certain kinds of currency you acquire in life. Most of it is ephemeral. But friendship and faith in the unseen world and the commitment to be true unto thine own self are the human glue that you never give up, not for any reason.”
― James Lee Burke, quote from Wayfaring Stranger

“Cancer and lightning go where they want. So does political corruption.”
― James Lee Burke, quote from Wayfaring Stranger

“He had been humiliated and treated like the white trash he was. Under the bedsheet that hides the identity of every Ku Klux Klansman is a cretinous, vicious, and childlike human being whose last holdout is his whites-only restroom.”
― James Lee Burke, quote from Wayfaring Stranger

“There are those who are made different in the womb.”
― James Lee Burke, quote from Wayfaring Stranger

“Sometimes your luck runs out and you have to accept that the life you planned was a dream written on water.”
― James Lee Burke, quote from Wayfaring Stranger

“Who can make sense of the roles we play? If I could draw any conclusion about the long, depressing slog of human progress, it’s the possibility that unseen elements lie just on the other side of the physical universe and that somehow we’re actors on the stage of the Globe, right across the Thames from a place called Pissing Alley, whether William Shakespeare or Christopher Marlowe are aware of our presence or not.”
― James Lee Burke, quote from Wayfaring Stranger

“The Homeric Epic does not have to be discovered inside a book; it begins just west of Fort Worth and extends all the way to Santa Monica." Wayfaring Stranger Pg. 415”
― James Lee Burke, quote from Wayfaring Stranger

“Deviants and monsters ran the camps where families were sent up the chimney or turned into bars of soap, but they would have been powerless without the clerks who sat anonymously behind typewriters and gave them bureaucratic legitimacy.”
― James Lee Burke, quote from Wayfaring Stranger

“You don’t realize the gift you have.”
― James Lee Burke, quote from Wayfaring Stranger

“Wicked men do not go away of their own accord.”
― James Lee Burke, quote from Wayfaring Stranger

“He was riding back through a doorway in time to a place that had nothing to do with the airplanes, and motorized vehicle and telephones wires, and radios that surrounded him now....... The woods in late autumn had become his private sun dappled cathedral, one that contained presences antithetical to the conventional notion of a church.”
― James Lee Burke, quote from Wayfaring Stranger

“We’re wayfaring strangers. We’re born alone, we die alone.”
― James Lee Burke, quote from Wayfaring Stranger

“It's fair to say that mortality takes many manifestations, but so does the indomitable nature of the human spirit, and it does so in ways that are sometimes hardly noticeable.”
― James Lee Burke, quote from Wayfaring Stranger

“Be your own man, even if you don’t add up to much.”
― James Lee Burke, quote from Wayfaring Stranger

“As flawed as Southern culture is, mendacity has always been treated in the South as a despicable characteristic. Notice how often Southerners casually address others as “you son of a bitch” with no insult intended. When the same person calls someone a “lying son of a bitch,” you know he’s serious.”
― James Lee Burke, quote from Wayfaring Stranger

“I’ve killed men against whom I had no grievance.”
― James Lee Burke, quote from Wayfaring Stranger

“If people stick together, they can always make do.”
― James Lee Burke, quote from Wayfaring Stranger

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About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.