Greg Iles > Quotes

“Any person who wants to govern the world is by definition the wrong person to do it.”
― Greg Iles, The Footprints of God

“I will do those things which make me happy today and which I can also live with ten years from now.”
― Greg Iles, The Quiet Game

“Sooner or later. It had better be sooner. Later is like the horizon; it recedes as you approach.”
― Greg Iles, Dead Sleep

“Einstein said the arrow of time flies in only one direction. Faulkner, being from Mississippi, understood the matter differently. He said the past is never dead; it's not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose provenance dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always.

And who among us, offered the chance, would not relive the day or hour in which we first knew love, or ecstasy, or made a choice that forever altered our future, negating a life we might have had? Such chances are rarely granted. Memory and grief prove Faulkner right enough, but Einstein knew the finality of action. If I cannot change what I had for lunch yesterday, I certainly cannot unmake a marriage, erase the betrayal of a friend, or board a ship that left port twenty years ago.”
― Greg Iles, The Quiet Game

“The temptation to second-guess is strong. But I must remember one thing.

Life is simple.

You are healthy or you are sick. You are faithful to your wife or you aren't. You are alive or you are dead.

I am alive.”
― Greg Iles

“When everything is at risk, good judgment, not haste, makes the difference between life and death. Panic is the enemy.”
― Greg Iles, The Devil's Punchbowl

“He always reminded us that every atom in our bodies was once part of a distant star that had exploded. He talked about how evolution moves from simplicity toward complexity, and how human intelligence is the highest known expression of evolution. I remember him telling me that a frog's brain is much more complex than a star. He saw human consciousness as the first neuron of the universe coming to life and awareness. A spark in the darkness, waiting to spread to fire.”
― Greg Iles, The Footprints of God

“Man plans, God laughs,”
― Greg Iles, Natchez Burning

“When a parent dies, your center of gravity is altered. Even if you lived apart from them—even if you walled yourself off from all contact—you are irrevocably lessened by their passing. Death, like gravity, respects no barriers.”
― Greg Iles, Cemetery Road

“Her touch was as knowing and confident as her eyes, and as she focused all her attention upon me, I remembered that there is nothing so thrilling as a woman of words when she decides that the time for words is past.”
― Greg Iles, The Footprints of God

“Man is the universe becoming conscious of itself.”
― Greg Iles, The Footprints of God

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

“People make a grievous error thinking that a list of facts is the truth. Facts are just the bare bones out of which truth is made.”
― Greg Iles, Natchez Burning

“You know, the truth isn’t hard to find, if you’re willing to get your hands dirty. Truth waits just under the surface for any man brave enough to scrape a little dirt away. But most people are too afraid or too lazy to get dirty. They’re afraid to ask the right questions. The hard questions.”
― Greg Iles, The Bone Tree

“You can't build happiness on someone else's pain.”
― Greg Iles, Natchez Burning

“The evil prosper, and the innocent pay the bills for them.”
― Greg Iles, Natchez Burning

“At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.   —Aristotle”
― Greg Iles, Natchez Burning

“Don’t keep a girl guessing too long, or she’ll find the answer somewhere else.”
― Greg Iles, Natchez Burning

“I don’t really understand the world anymore. But maybe there’s some faint hope that the good people on both sides can come together.”
― Greg Iles, Mississippi Blood

“I must learn to be content with being happier than I deserve. —Jane Austen, Persuasion, paraphr.”
― Greg Iles, The Bone Tree

“My favorite book is The Mysterious Island. I order my books from a flimsy catalog the teacher hands out to every student in the class. Emil and the Detectives. White Fang. Like that. Money is tight for us, but when it comes to books my mother is a spendthrift; I can order as many as I like. I sit here day after day, waiting for my books to arrive. My books. It takes a month or more, but when they finally do, when the teacher opens the big box and passes out the orders to the kids, checking the books against a form taken from her desk, I glow with happiness. I've never had the newest dress, or the prettiest, but I always have the tallest stack of books. Little paperbacks that smell of wet ink. I lay my cheek against their cool covers, anticipating the stories inside, knowing all the other girls wonder what I could possibly want with those books.”
― Greg Iles, Dead Sleep

“If I cannot change what I had for lunch yesterday, I certainly cannot unmake a marriage, erase the betrayal of a friend, or board a ship that left port twenty years ago.”
― Greg Iles, The Quiet Game

“Whenever life gets too good, whenever fate hands you something wonderful, something else gets taken away.”
― Greg Iles, The Devil's Punchbowl

“Jung didn’t try to separate good and evil. He knew that both exist in every human heart. He called the propensity to evil the Shadow. And he believed that trying to deny or repress the Shadow is dangerous. Because it can’t be done. He believed you have to recognize your Shadow, come to grips with it, accept it, and integrate it.”
― Greg Iles, The Quiet Game

“We do not just belong to this universe, we are it.”
― Greg Iles, The Footprints of God

“I educated myself, discovered my gift for language, learned that the larger world lay not across oceans but within the human mind and heart.”
― Greg Iles, The Quiet Game

“We judge and punish based on facts, but facts are not truth. Facts are like a buried skeleton uncovered long after death. Truth is fluid. Truth is alive. To know the truth requires understanding, the most difficult human art. It requires seeing all things at once, forward and backward, the way God sees.”
― Greg Iles, Blood Memory

“All partnerships fail in the end, just like marriages. The only life after death any human being will ever know is staying in a marriage or a partnership after it’s over. And that’s not life—it’s living death.”
― Greg Iles, True Evil

“God is all powerful.
God is good.
Evil exists.
You can reconcile any two of those statements, but not all three.”
― Greg Iles, Greg Iles CD Collection 4: Black Cross, 24 Hours, Third Degree

“I listened in amazement. You saw a face on an American street, or in an office, and you had no idea that a tragic epic lay behind it.”
― Greg Iles, The Footprints of God