Parke Godwin Quotes

You haven’t changed for hundreds of years, and your sins, such as they are, have not grown in complexity. A moment of yes in a lifetime of thou shalt not. Certain punishment out of a steaming Protestant imagination.

Infantile, needing to be the center and reason for creation, the less educated or advantaged subject needs a distorted miraculous theology to support a perilous existence, externally and constantly threatened as it is by “them.”

Look, these clowns need a messiah because the truth of the world always goes down easier with a few miracles and a lot of blood. It’s a very old game, the rules don’t change. I’d say Stride is a flaming, fourteen-karat folk hero. Look at this crowd; you’re not talking about contented, mature people. You ever see a happy man who needed to conquer the world?

Religion is what you sing on Sunday, Miss Stovall. Your true faith is what you want all week.

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.

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

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.

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.”

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

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

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.

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.

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

Got no time for games," Charity told the dog. "Hope you don't bite."
"Not at all. The hound yawned to his ears. But beware the owner. He thinks.