...people grow into what they always were.

Every Cloak Rolled in Blood

James Lee Burke

Age has brought me little if any wisdom. I knew more at twenty-one than at forty.  Why is that? Because at age forty I was dumb enough to believe I knew anything at all. The only lesson I've learned in life is that the human personality does not change, and our propensity for destroying the earth and our fellow man is stronger and more wanton than it has ever been, and if the incineration of our cities and civilians and the increased lethality of our weapons during the last one hundred years has not taught us that, nothing will. 

Every Cloak Rolled In Blood

James Lee Burke

American History, in a Paragraph

An aberrant social contract in American was created when the first British ships set sail with their cargo of slaves packed like spoons belowdecks, a repository of bilge and rotten rations and the stench of sweat and feces and corpses and stillborn infants and raped women who killed themselves by chewing open their veins.  My ancestors, an elite group, profited from those ships.  Culpepper's Cockney ancestors did the dirty work.  They threw their souls over the gunwales, along with the corpses they pulled with ropes out of the hold every morning, and later were the custodians of the whip and the branding iron in the sugarcane fields where I grew up, and forever after were taught by the oligarchy that Black people were their enemy, lustful, subhuman, idle and mendacious, respondent only to the pillory: the only human beings lower than themselves and, at the same time, the only creatures over whom they could have total power, and none of that has changed, no matter what we tell ourselves. 

Every Cloak Rolled in Blood

James Lee Burke