Parke Godwin Quotes

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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?”

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.

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

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.

You must have been an evangelical."
"Tabernacle of the Born Again Savior," Charity owned with wistful pride. "Not that it helped a whole lot."
"Indeed." Jake sank again in his chair. "Tabernacle of the…the more shriveled the existence, the more elaborate the credentials. Virtue measured by what you wouldn't do, at least under scrutiny, and others judged for what they would and got caught at. You don't want Grace, Miss Stovall. You want to get even.

Woody had more talent than drive, but a musician, even a poor one, was preferable to a fanatic. He could only assault the ear.

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.”

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