I recently enjoyed Greg Iles novel, Natchez Burning.

Here are some of my favorite quotes. Please note, I don’t necessarily agree with all the below quotes, but find them helpful, intriguing, or illustrative of certain ideas or points of view.

“If a man is forced to choose between the truth and his father, only a fool chooses the truth. A great writer said that and for a long time I agreed with him . . . But, put into practice, this adage could cloak almost any sin . . . Perhaps we expect too much of our fathers. Nothing frightens me more than the faith in my daughter’s eyes. How many men deserve that kind of trust. One by one, the mentors I’ve most admired eventually revealed chinks in their armor, cracks in their facades, and tired feet of clay or worse.”

“He didn’t blame Peggy for their rather perfunctory sex life. He blamed her parents and the long line of ancestors who had blindly embraced repressive strains of Christianity with their puritanical separation of body and spirit. The equation of pleasure with shame and the near deification of guilt. All that had led to generations of frustrated, lying men and guilt-ridden women.”

“The faith of children is an awesome thing to behold. If only we could all be worthy of it.”

“Pen would learn the most painful of laws in his own time. If a man lived long enough, his past would always overtake him. No matter how fast he ran or how morally he tried to live subsequently. And how men dealt with that law ultimately revealed their true natures.”

“Men are men and gods are for story books. And if you read your Edith Hamilton or Jane Harrison or the Old Testament for that matter, you’d know that gods acted like men most of the time or worse.”

“Forgiving somebody doesn’t mean they shouldn’t pay a price for what they’d done. That’s God’s business. Hating somebody just poisons you, not them.”