Parke Godwin Quotes

Hell, there’s no mystery between men and women, except why some poor damn fool like me ain’t figured that out yet.

Sorlij tried to imagine a place less organized than this. The concept was a challenge.

Judas/Jake got into the cab and and drove out of shot.
“So that’s the evilest man in the whole world ever.” Charity pondered the screen. She dunked a strawberry in champagne. “Talks mean about folks.”
“With considerable authority,” Simnel said. “A true believer at one time who would do anything to make need into truth. Now he watches the rest of them doing the same thing over and over again one way or another.”

Countries are just like women. Sooner or later everyone loses their cherry and gets to be just another broad on the block.

Hell might be a strain, she concluded, but you couldn’t beat it for the new and different or the interesting men.

If you are in trouble, so am I. Two rowers in a sinking lifeboat telling each other 'I told you so' doesn't keep either from drowning.

One can think," Jake mused over the chessboard. "If thought is desirable. For me it was a curse, an obsession, like chess. Always the intellectual yearning to be the man of action. To be, like Brutus, a fulcrum of history. That was denied me until one day when I—acted. I'll never know whether I was right at the wrong time for my own sake or wrong at the right time for the sake of history.

Roy’s a fuck-up like Hitler. What’s the opposite of fail-safe? Success-safe. These turkeys have got to lose because most of their thinking is off the wall to begin with. Think about it: there’s Adolf rearranging Europe like a hyperactive housewife, shrewd as they come, and still getting his horoscope done every goddamned day, which is like seriously figuring Santa Claus into the national budget. These people are not coming from common sense; they simply can’t think big.

Your world is a sewer, Mr. Stride. One can almost absolve you for being one of its diseases.

Smart eats, stupid starves.

But what's it mean," Roy cried, agonized. "What is it for?"
"Not for anything. It exists.

Roy’s cry of horror filled of the universe, more horrible for the indifferent silence that swallowed it up.

Paranoia, the common cold of neurosis. The paranoiac, perceiving all external stimuli as threat, needs to see his enemies, not merely sense their external presence. Being imaginary, these threats must be fleshed out to visible targets, the more clearly defined the better.

The therapists will have a field day and we’ll probably lose hordes to schizophrenia. But cry all they want, stomp around, kick furniture, the human race will get rid of their fairy-tale notions of good, evil and the cosmos, and by God—by Me, I guess—they will grow the hell up.

Lengthy memos were always coming down from somewhere to be read, initialed and passed on. Never less than ten single-spaced pages, they boiled down to the need for efficiency and cutting paperwork.