Ed Simon > Quotes

“these people of millennia past were not like us but with more dirt. Their beliefs were different, their prayers were different, their faith was different, their very thoughts were different, and yet we still live within their long shadows.”
― Ed Simon, Devil's Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain

“Satan’s system can be described in a multitude of ways, but for the past three centuries his hand has largely been an invisible one, operating through industry and technology, markets and capitalism.”
― Ed Simon, Devil's Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain

“the greatest work of conjuration Simon ever accomplished was to become something so much greater than a mere man. He became a story.”
― Ed Simon, Devil's Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain

“Satan’s system can be described in a multitude of ways, but for the past three centuries his hand has largely been an invisible one, operating through industry and technology, markets and capitalism”
― Ed Simon, Devil's Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain

“Irenaeus dismisses the faith of Simon by saying that the Magus had supposed that the “apostles themselves performed their curse by the art of magic, and not by the power of God,” but the line separating magic from religion is porous.”
― Ed Simon, Devil's Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain

“The distinction between sanity and insanity is narrower than the razor’s edge,” Dick self-perceptively wrote, “sharper than a hound’s tooth, more agile than a mule deer.”
― Ed Simon, Devil's Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain

“The nature of art is that it merely represents, that it’s at a remove from reality regardless of how expertly or inexpertly accomplished.”
― Ed Simon, Devil's Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain

“As posited by the Grand Inquisitor, Christ came not as a representative of organized religion, but as something transcendent and anarchic, and for most people the condition of existing as a naked soul is too much to bear.”
― Ed Simon, Devil's Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain

“Only the pure spiritual rebellion of a Christ is capable of true subversion against the princes of this world, and only He was truly capable of accomplishing it.”
― Ed Simon, Devil's Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain

“The God of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Gnostics maintained, was really the Devil.”
― Ed Simon, Devil's Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain

“Whether or not you sell your soul to Satan or to God, you’ve still sold your soul. The numinous realm, the astral plane, the transcendent dimension—the sacred—is a terrifying kingdom, defined by its difference from everything that is safe and familiar and human.”
― Ed Simon, Devil's Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain

“Dido, the Queen of Carthage, The Jew of Malta, Edward the Second, the two parts of Tamburlaine,”
― Ed Simon, Devil's Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain

“Faust's story is ultimately about the burdens of artifice, but the curse is that this living man accrued so many stories about himself than he transition into legend, and in the process erased the particulars of his soul.”
― Ed Simon, Devil's Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain

“What else is a woman but a foe to friendship, an inescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil of nature, painted with fair colors,”
― Ed Simon, Devil's Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain

“The difference between “can” and “will” is massive; religious wars have been fought on that difference. The replacement of this one word shifts the entire theological orientation of Dr. Faustus.”
― Ed Simon, Devil's Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain

“This is the story of a failed Faustian bargain, yet a Faustian bargain all the same. What a bizarre story then, the tale of the Devil commanding God to bow down. What exactly does it mean for the mere creature to entice the Creator to transgress?”
― Ed Simon, Devil's Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain

“The doors of heaven and hell are adjacent and identical. —Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation, of Christ (1952)”
― Ed Simon, Devil's Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain

“The states of possession correspond to our neuroses,” wrote Haizmann’s most famous psychoanalyst, none other than Sigmund Freud,”
― Ed Simon, Devil's Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain

“but they also represent the irrationalism of the witch-hunter, ironically willing to commit gross evil in a battle to eliminate evil.”
― Ed Simon, Devil's Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain

“Gnostics were austere and stoic rejectors of this world and its prince, understanding everyday life to be a Faustian bargain. To eat, to sleep, to work, to procreate, to live, to exist, to be—all of it was to give over a measure of your life to the Demon who had tricked us into worshiping him as the Lord. Our being itself is Faustian.”
― Ed Simon, Devil's Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain

“A transmutation of flesh into words, of matter into ideas, of man into metaphor, but nonetheless an ever-shifting symbol,”
― Ed Simon, Devil's Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain