James Lee Burke Quotes

I've always looked for the perfect life to step into. I've taken all the paths to get where I wanted. But no matter where I go, I still come home.

For me, 'Room' is an opportunity to relive an aspect of my childhood that I hadn't put a ton of thought into.

It's the circle of life, and it moves us all, through despair and hope, through faith and love, 'till we find our place, on the path unwinding.

I saw what I had been fighting for: it was for me, a scared child.

I look in the mirror through the eyes of the child that was me.

Life goes not in a straight line, lad, but in a circle. The first half we spend venturing as far as the world's end from home and kin and stillness, and the latter half brings us back, by roundabout ways but surely, to that state from which we set out.

The child is father of the man: And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety.

I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be.

I want my work to help people rediscover the child that's hiding in them.

I never want to lose the story-loving child within me, or the adolescent, or the young woman, or the middle-aged one, because all together they help me to be fully alive on this journey, and show me that I must be willing to go where it takes me, even through the valley of the shadow.

I'm still getting to the good part / the breaking down / learning how to write my story.

Music mirrors where we should go, have gone and can go. Music is an abstraction.

This story of loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature.

There is a time in every life when paths are chosen, character is forged. I could have chosen a different path. But I didn’t. I failed myself.

As children grow, they gravitate to their fates.

Sometimes you make choices in life and sometimes choices make you.

Getting lost along your path is a part of finding the path you are meant to be on.

Paradoxically, only journeying backward in time and reentering the home we once knew allows us to go forward to the home we've always wanted.

I look back and say, "This must have been somebody else." I am not going to tell you that when I was 4, I dreamed about all of this.

Find the meaning behind whatever it is you're going through because everybody's got something.

Sometimes you find your path, sometimes it finds you.

She wondered if literature might lose some of its interest when she reached an age or state of mind where her life was set on such a sure course that the things she read might stop seeming so powerfully like alternate directions for her being.

Steven [Sebring] was documenting me as a widow with two children, going from 50 to 60 years old. My focus, during that time, was to rediscover myself, stay healthy, take care of my kids and reestablish a relationship with the people.

That will be the position I will be in as long as I'm on earth--that is, seeking the right path that God would have laid out for me.

Life involves passions, faiths, doubts, and courage.