Greg Iles Quotes

“Any person who wants to govern the world is by definition the wrong person to do it.”

— Greg Iles

“I will do those things which make me happy today and which I can also live with ten years from now.”

— Greg Iles

“The truth is rarely pure and never simple. -Oscar Wilde”

— Greg Iles

“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

“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

“Man is the universe becoming conscious of itself.”

— Greg Iles

“Just because you will not see the work completed does not mean you are free not to take it up.”

— Greg Iles

“At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst. -Aristotle”

— Greg Iles

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

“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

“God is all powerful.
God is good.
Evil exists.
You can reconcile any two of those statements, but not all three.”

— Greg Iles

“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

“For once the stone hits the surface of the pond, the ripples never really stop.”

— Greg Iles

“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

“The evil prosper, and the innocent pay the bills for them.”

— Greg Iles

“Whenever life gets too good, whenever fate hands you something wonderful, something else gets taken away.”

— Greg Iles

The Terrible Truth is that brutality is part of human nature, and all the laws in the world can't neuter it.

— Greg Iles

“Like my best friend, I asked for drums for Christmas, and got them. But when he moved on to guitar, I realized two things: (1) guitar is a much more expressive instrument, (2) way more girls pay attention to guitar players than to drummers.”

— Greg Iles

“My ancestors fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War; I was raised in Natchez, Miss.; I performed in the Confederate Pageant for a decade; I dug ditches and loaded trucks with black men who taught me more than any book ever could; and I graduated from Ole Miss. Anyone who survived that is a de facto expert on the South.”

— Greg Iles

“My father served as an Army doctor in West Germany in the late '50s and early '60s. As a result, he and my mother - both native southerners - were acutely aware of what had happened during the Holocaust.”

— Greg Iles

“The South is the home of 'an eye for an eye.' 'Turning the other cheek'? The South can't see that.”

— Greg Iles

“I like taking a character at the most intense moments of their lives and exploring all that in full and then moving on.”

— Greg Iles

My mother, a teacher, encouraged me to use my creativity as an actual way to make a living, and my father, a Mississippi physician, did two things. First, he taught me that all human beings should be treated equally because no one is better than anyone else, and he never pressured me to become a doctor.

— Greg Iles

Southern Gothic is alive and well. It's not just a genre, it is a way of life.

— Greg Iles

“I deal with the human psychology and evil. They are my twin issues.”

— Greg Iles

Some things we must pass over in silence.

— Greg Iles

“'See Spot run!' is a perfect sentence in some ways. But I doubt the critics would say it was.”

— Greg Iles

And I do have one surefire plot I have not and probably never will write because of my fear someone will carry it out.

— Greg Iles

“Let me tell you a secret, Caitlin. We're still in the cave. It's just bigger, and we wear nicer clothes. We make alliances and try to be civil, we save the weak instead of leaving them out in the cold to die ...”

— Greg Iles

“He had never seen such eyes before, not even in the faces of soldiers unmanned in the midst of great carnage. Eyes like black mirrors, at once shallow and bottomless. He had the feeling that if he pressed his finger to one of those eyes, it would shatter and fall inward through a black cavern of grief and loss that could never be filled.”

— Greg Iles

Because death is the end, and if a man doesn't speak before it silences him, then the things he holds closest die with him.

— Greg Iles

“Darkness turned to noon. Even with the nose cone of the Learjet pointed away from the blast, the flash blinded everyone inside. Diaz lost control of the aircraft. It pitched over into a screaming, spinning dive, hurtling earthward at over five hundred miles per hour. In the cabin, people slammed into each other in the terror of flashblindness. General Steyn screamed in pain. Hauer half-fell past Burton into the cockpit. "Straighten up!" he screamed.”

— Greg Iles

“Elbowed Danny. You think Shields is the father of that baby?”

— Greg Iles

There's nothing harder than fighting alone, with no one to keep you company in your foxhole.

— Greg Iles

When we reach the intersection with Homochitto Street, I turn right, into town, and soon we're passing Dunleith, the antebellum mansion that I always say makes Tara from Gone with the Wind look like a woodshed.

— Greg Iles

“For nothing is lost, nothing is ever lost. There is always the clue, the canceled check, the smear of lipstick, the footprint in the canna bed, the condom on the park path, the twitch in the old wound, the baby shoes dipped in bronze, the taint in the blood stream. And all times are one time, and all those dead in the past never lived before our definition gives them life, and out of the shadow their eyes implore us. -Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men”

— Greg Iles

“Albert didn't know how that skinny school teacher could take what Willie gave her. But that was another thing he'd learned over the years; the size of the woman on the outside didn't mean nothing. It was how much hunger she had on the inside that made her what she was between the sheets.”

— Greg Iles

“You can't build happiness on someone else's pain.”

— Greg Iles

“For Sweden, the price of aiding the Allies could be fifty thousand uninvited guests”

— Greg Iles

“IF A MAN is forced to choose between the truth and his father, only a fool chooses the truth.”

— Greg Iles

Men fantasize about wanton women, but when they meet one, they're paralyzed by fear.

— Greg Iles

“Carefully negotiated his way”

— Greg Iles

“Sheriff Dennis lifts an Ole Miss coffee mug off the desk and spits tobacco juice into it. "I like spitting on the Rebels," he says distractedly.”

— Greg Iles

Her? I wonder. "Tom?" I say, taking advantage of

— Greg Iles

“God is merely a part of the human brain, an evolutionary coping mechanism that developed to make bearable our awareness of our own deaths. When”

— Greg Iles

I don't say it was hard, because everybody got it hard, some way.

— Greg Iles

“Who gave of their time: Joe Files, MD, Rod Givens, MD,”

— Greg Iles

“Even chitlins smell good to a starving man.”

— Greg Iles

Sometimes we think we are moving randomly. But random behavior is rare in humans. We are always spiraling around something, whether we see it or not, a secret center of gravity with the invisible power of a black hole.

— Greg Iles

“The larger world lay not across oceans but within the human mind and heart.”

— Greg Iles