The Stand

That wasn't any act of God. That was an act of pure human fuckery.

Show me a man or a woman alone and I'll show you a saint. Give me two and they'll fall in love. Give me three and they'll invent the charming thing we call 'society'. Give me four and they'll build a pyramid. Give me five and they'll make one an outcast. Give me six and they'll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they'll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home.

No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just come out the other side. Or you don't.

The place where you made your stand never mattered. Only that you were there...and still on your feet.

People who try hard to do the right thing always seem mad.

The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance...logic can be happily tossed out the window.

A person can't change all at once.

The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want for nothing. He makes me lie down in the green pastures. He greases up my head with oil. He gives me kung-fu in the face of my enemies. Amen

He smiles a lot. But I think there might be worms inside him making him smile.

You couldn't not like someone who liked the guitar.

Your first impulse is to share good news, your second is to club someone with it.

Even the company of the mad was better than the company of the dead.

Love didn't grow very well in a place where there was only fear

If we don't have each other, we go crazy with loneliness. When we do, we go crazy with togetherness.

Sometimes [...] real love is silent as well as blind.

She couldn't be on his wavelength all the time. That's all. When you could recognize that and deal with it, you were on your way to an adult relationship.

Nobody likes to see a stupid guy wise up.

You just couldn't get hold of the things you had done and turn them right again. Such power might be given to the gods, but it was not given to men and women, and that was probably a good thing. Had it been otherwise, people would probably die of old age still trying to rewrite their teens.

Men who find themselves late are never sure. They are all the things the civics books tell us the good citizen should be: partisans but never zealots, respectors of the facts which attend each situation but never benders of those facts, uncomfortable in positions of leadership but rarely unable to turn down a responsibility once it has been offered . . . or thrust upon them. They make the best leaders in a democracy because they are unlikely to fall in love with power.

Life was such a wheel that no man could stand upon it for long. And it always, at the end, came round to the same place again.

The thought process can never be complete without articulation.

God doesn't bribe, child. He just makes a sign and lets people take it as they will.

And when there are enough outsiders together in one place, a mystic osmosis takes place and you're inside.

Above, the stars shone hard and bright, sparks struck off the dark skin of the universe.

Silent white light filled the world. And the righteous and unrighteous alike were consumed in that holy fire.

There’s always a choice. That’s God’s way, always will be. Your will is still free. Do as you will. There’s no set of leg-irons on you. But... this is what God wants of you.

It's hard enough for a person to keep their own socks pulled up, let alone someone else's.

Who gets to be best-liked in any community? Who is the most trusted? Why, the man who does the dirty job, of course, and does it with a smile. The man who does the job you couldn't bring yourself to do.

There are all sorts of dream interpretations, Freud's being the most notorious, but I have always believed they served a simple eliminatory function, and not much more - that dreams are the psyche's way of taking a good dump every now and then.

Superstition, like true love, needs time to grow and reflect upon itself.