Parke Godwin Quotes

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?

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?”

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.”

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Honor thy stereotypes, the authors of thy thinking, for without them, thou wouldst have to see.

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.

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.

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