This piece of land was our original sin, except we had found no baptismal rite to expunge it from our lives. That green-purple field of new cane was rooted in rib cage and eye socket. But what of the...
Then an event happened that caused him to wonder at the great folly that seemed to govern his life, namely, his attempts to plan and control his future. Most of the events that changed his life had ta...
Then I saw the consuming nature of her fear, her willingness to believe that exploitative charlatans could change her fate or really cared what happened to her, the dread and angst that congealed like...
Then Belmont discovered the carnival world of Louisiana politics, in the way a mental patient might wander into a theme park for the insane and realize that life held more promise than he had ever dre...
The word criminal is more an emotional than legal term. Go to any U.S. post office and view the faces on the wanted posters. Like Dick Tracy caricatures, they stare out of the black-and-white photogra...
The sky was purple, streaked with fire, the palm trees like scorched tin cutouts against the sun. I woke at four in the morning and could not sleep again, my heart congealed with a sense of mortality...
The human spirit is frail. People believe whatever they need to believe. I feel sorry for all of them.
Solitude and peace with oneself are probably the only preparation one has for death.
Saints don’t heed warnings because they consider them irrelevant. Fools don’t heed them because they think the lightning dancing across the sky, the thunder rolling through the woods, are only there t...
Prosecutors often wince when they have to take a child abuser to trial, because usually the only witnesses they can use are children who are terrified at the prospect of testifying against their paren...
People are what they do, not what they say, not what they think, not what they pretend to be.
PEOPLE ARE WHAT they do, not what they think, not what they say.
My experience with age it instills a degree of patience in some, leaves the virtuous spiritually unchanged, feeds the character defects in others, and brings little wisdom to any of us.
Maybe you’ve been there. You go into a police or sheriff’s station after a gang of black kids forced you to stop your car while they smashed out your windows with garbage cans; a strung-out addict mad...
I returned to New Orleans and my problems with pari-mutuel windows and a dark-haired, milk-skinned wife from Martinique who went home with men from the Garden District while I was passed out in a hous...
I also figuredd out that what we call our destiny is usually determined by two or three casual decision which on the surface seem about as important as spitting your gum through a sewer grate.
His round, pink face was smiling and happy, his green eyes lighted with an alcoholic shine.
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 la...
He had learned in Vietnam there were three groups of people who got you killed—pencil pushers, amateurs, and idealists.
Every drunkard has many moments of shame that live like carpet tacks in his memory,