28 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.
Waiting for the Galactic Bus (1988)
Paranoia, the common cold of neurosis. The paranoiac, perceiving all external stimuli as threat, needs to see his enemies, not merely sense their external presence. Being imaginary, these threats must be fleshed out to visible targets, the more clearly defined the better.
Waiting for the Galactic Bus (1988)
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.
Waiting for the Galactic Bus (1988)
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.
Waiting for the Galactic Bus (1988)
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.”
Waiting for the Galactic Bus (1988)
Smart eats, stupid starves.
Waiting for the Galactic Bus (1988)
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?”
Waiting for the Galactic Bus (1988)
“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.”
Waiting for the Galactic Bus (1988)