Parke Godwin Quotes

We're here with Judas Iscariot on the fringe of the delirious demonstration for Roy Stride. Judas, can you comment on the meteoric rise of Stride and the White Paladins?"
Judas reached through the cab window and fetched his cap. "I'd say the hopeless schmucks have found the kind of government they deserve. Always do.

Was that what all my praying was about? “Lord Amighty, no wonder I am damned.”
“No, Miss Stovall. Love and hell are alike in that respect; they are what you bring to them. The script is yours; only the props are furnished.”

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

Nemesis, come! And you unfeeling stars, I hurl defiance for reply, and cast into the balance for the world to see my soul ’gainst thy insensate cruelty.

Subconsciously aware of the fragility of his artificial reality, the paranoiac must ever reinforce its defenses with more and more elaborate rationale. His virtues must be defined, his enemies painted in primary colors. The basic motive of fear is raised to mystic proportion; a cause, uniform, a symbol. He proclaims his purposes one with God’s.
“No—”
The central infection inflames and eventually mortifies the entire psyche until any healthy stimulus becomes alien.

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.

Coyle knew to its core the essence of Charity Stovall, who had lived her twenty years in the lower echelons of Christian belief, a lurid topography with no middle ground. Her theology was banal but rendered in full color, a Caucasian Green Pastures at one end, smoke, fire, pain—the whole Faustian, Exorcist claptrap at the other.

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

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.

True believers coming to the fore with the same old theme—don’t you make out you’re better than us—defining a narrow God by what they themselves hated and feared.

I will not comment on your accent. Similes founder, metaphors fail.

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.

Smart eats, stupid starves.

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.

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