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.

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

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.

It wasn’t your usual vacation. But what’s so bad, Char? I’ve seen heaven and you’ve seen hell, and they’re just what? Common sense, funny and horrible with a lot of bullshit thrown in, just like the six o’clock news.

Judas shrugged. “He’s taking their own fear, frustration and anger and selling it back to them with a new ribbon around it. Easy answers, easy targets: out with the Jews and blacks, down with the intellectuals, which means anyone who’s better off or disagrees with them. Slogans, marching bands and the promise of blood. How can he miss?”

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.

Smart eats, stupid starves.

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

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.

If respectability is the daughter of morality, her jealous sister is blackmail.

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.

Hard men and women, from Barion’s firsthand recollection: not always thinking of God but seeing Him hard as themselves when they did. Their descendants much the same, not as hard but needing that peculiarly American form of religious ecstasy blended of poverty, ignorance, degenerated mysticism, collected injuries and the need for vengeance.

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.

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.