All the Sinners Bleed

We all choose to be skeptics when the truth is inconvenient.

Sometimes grief is love unexpressed. Other times it’s regret made flesh.

Humility is not thinking less of yourself. It’s thinking of yourself less,

All I do know is violence begets more violence and all violence is a confession of pain. Hurt people tend to hurt people.

Terrible people can do good things sometimes. But they like doing the terrible things more.

Scott was the type of man who complained about the world being too sensitive these days without ever acknowledging the irony of his own fragility or privilege.

Even the people we loved kept pieces of themselves hidden away from the light.

A lie can be halfway around the world while the truth is still pulling up his britches,

Evil is rarely complicated. It’s just fucking bold.

It occurred to him that no place was more confused about it's past or more terrified of the future than the South.

The South doesn’t change. You can try to hide the past, but it comes back in ways worse than the way it was before. Terrible ways.

the devil can quote the Good Book as well as any angel.

He still loved the man, but it was in those painful moments that he realized adults didn’t really know more than kids. That everyone was making it up as they went along and religion was just another crutch, like liquor or weed.

God can be everywhere at the same time if he wants, but he ain’t in every building that calls itself a church. You can stand in a pulpit and call yourself a minister. I can roll around in mud and call myself a pig too. Don’t mean you was called to preach, and it don’t mean I was meant to be pork chops,

I wish Jesus was real so he could chase you down the aisle with a goddamn whip,

Old Testament, New Testament, it was just words with a little w, written by zealots as PR for their new cult founded in the memory of a dead carpenter.

Preston thought capitalism was great if people who looked like you were the ones sitting in the Capitol. For everyone else, well, sometimes it was like trying to climb a greased pole in mittens.

Flannery O’Connor said the South is Christ-haunted. It’s haunted, all right. By the hypocrisy of Christianity. All these churches, all these Bibles, but it’s places just like Charon where the poor are ostracized. Where girls are called whores if they report a rape. Where I can’t go to the Watering Hole without wondering if the bartender done spit in my drink. People say this kind of thing doesn’t happen in a place like Charon. Darlene, this kind of thing is what makes places like Charon run. It’s the rock upon which this temple is built,” Titus said.

Titus didn’t have the heart to tell Darlene that no one told anyone all their secrets. Even the people we loved kept pieces of themselves hidden away from the light.

It occurred to him no place was more confused by its past or more terrified of the future than the South.

Davy, if your cousin ain’t a racist, he is mighty goddamn comfortable with being around racists. That’s a distinction without a difference.

What is known is that in 1805 in the dead of night a group of white landowners, chafing at the limits of their own manifest destiny, set fire to the last remaining indigenous village on the teardrop-shaped peninsula that would become Charon County. Those who escaped the flames were brought down by muskets with no regard to age, gender, or infirmity. That was the first of many tragedies in the history of Charon. The cannibalism of the winter of 1853. The malaria outbreak of 1901. The United Daughters of the Confederacy picnic poisoning of 1935. The Danforth family murder-suicide of 1957. The tent revival baptismal drownings of 1968, and on and on. The soil of Charon County, like most towns and counties in the South, was sown with generations of tears. They were places where violence and mayhem were celebrated as the pillars of a pioneering spirit every Founders’ Day in the county square.

I prayed for you. Because I know you’re hurting. She was my wife. She was the best woman I’ve ever known. So I know how much you’re hurting, because I’m feeling it too. But, son, faith is never foolish,” Albert said. “Pop,” Titus said as he brushed past his father and went into the house, “faith broke my fucking heart.

to remind Black Southerners that to some of their white neighbors they were just escaped cattle meant to be sacrificed on the altar of the Lost Cause.

The South doesn’t change … just the names and the dates and the faces. And sometimes even those don’t change, not really. Sometimes it’s the same day and the same faces waiting for you when you close your eyes. “Waiting for you in the dark…

Faith is a fragile thing, Sheriff. Do you know that? They like to talk about mustard seeds and not walking by sight and all that shit, but the truth is it don’t take much to break your faith. Get sick, get broke, or lose your only son. Your faith will run out of town faster than a deadbeat daddy,

It was a trait common to the recently saved. Especially if one suffered from some form of dependency in their previous unsaved life. It was like they traded a secular addiction for a sanctified one.

In the former capital of the confederacy, equalities surest foothold was found on the autopsy table.

God loves the believer and the nonbeliever all the same. Yeah, but I don't love him back. I left that abusive relationship a long time ago, Titus thought.

adults didn’t really know more than kids. That everyone was making it up as they went along and religion was just another crutch, like liquor or weed.