Two-Step Devil Quotes

“(So much kindness among you fleshsacks, is what I’m saying. You forget this. You polarize, call something evil and forget the goodness the evil engenders. You call something good and forget the evil the good depends on. But the kindness! If you counterbalanced all the kindness with the evils you keep putting before your eyes—your newspapers and TVs, apps and websites—you would not recognize your own planet.)”
― Jamie Quatro, Two-Step Devil

“(And this is the complication for you fleshsacks, isn’t it? You cannot stand for the horrific and the beautiful to touch, cannot fathom a system in which one person benefits from the suffering of another. But so it is. So Creator has ordained. What a pathetic state he’s left you in.)”
― Jamie Quatro, Two-Step Devil

“No God without God’s opposite. No heaven without hell. I oppose you to give you the chance to live forever. (Hangs blade, adjusts.) True, the myth of Satan is finished. But when the giants dissipate, the windmills stand.”
― Jamie Quatro, Two-Step Devil

“It’s color that will save you, Michael, my mother said. Not religion. Red orange and yellow will wake up your need, green blue and purple will satisfy it. Religions are myths invented by men to keep power away from women, but even when you recognize this you will not be able to save yourself.”
― Jamie Quatro, Two-Step Devil

“I turn my back to the camera to look at a wall of painted-glass window hangings: GRANDMA, SISTER, MOTHER. Why would anyone want to hang a sign telling who they are to someone else?”
― Jamie Quatro, Two-Step Devil

“Thou seest we are not all alone unhappy; This wide and universal theatre Presents more woeful pageants than the scene Wherein we play in. —Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act 2, Scene 7”
― Jamie Quatro, Two-Step Devil

“While she suffered the hours felt like weeks, but when it was over and he was looking back on the years with his wife—eighteen years—it seemed he’d only known her a matter of days.”
― Jamie Quatro, Two-Step Devil

“It was the war that killed him, his mama said. Your father came home already dead. Just took his body some years to figure it out.”
― Jamie Quatro, Two-Step Devil

“But before he was the Prophet, Winston was a regular devil like the rest.”
― Jamie Quatro, Two-Step Devil

“He’d long ago stopped worrying about clock setting, the forward and the backward. Another mile farther into Alabama and the sun rose and set an hour sooner, which proved time was nothing, just a sheet of wax paper laid over everything you could see. But if you could get up above the wax, above the Earth and into space where you could see the planet—a bright spinning thing—you would see how time was nothing but a shifting in and out of sunlight.”
― Jamie Quatro, Two-Step Devil

“Workers pouring the backbone and limbs, welders shaping the skeleton, sealing together the bones of a nation. And who were the doctors and lawyers, the politicians and bankers? The soft tissue sitting overtop. Flesh thinking it was independent of the bones underneath, detaching itself and starting to dry up. And the rotting lips kept making speeches at airports. Madness. America was consuming itself. A snake with its tail in its mouth.”
― Jamie Quatro, Two-Step Devil

“Why would anyone waste their time listening to a politician talk about civil rights? Politicians were the ones at fault, setting the whites against the Blacks so they wouldn’t join together to fight the real enemy: the Unholy American Trinity. Businesses taking the sweat of the poor and turning it into fancy cars and airplanes; government taking money from their paychecks to make rich neighborhoods prettier and show the world how America is better than other countries; preachers humiliating them for enjoying God-given pleasures, food and drink and women. The lady he visited at the brothel. And as long as there was a race problem, the government gained power, businesses got richer, and preachers fattened themselves and their churches.”
― Jamie Quatro, Two-Step Devil

“He took the Bible home and shoved it beneath his cot. From time to time he thought of it under there, like a thick block of money with stairsteps cut into the gold. People who read the Bible thought the answer to things getting better was in another world. They trusted in a God who was supposed to be three in one and one in three. But the only trinity he knew of was the one the men in the foundry talked about: Government plus Big Business plus Church. Three joined together as one to keep the working class down.”
― Jamie Quatro, Two-Step Devil

“But he’d seen withdrawal before. Meth heads with their tin cans and lit rocks, smack addicts who went from snorting to smoking to needles. He’d gone through it himself after he cold-turkeyed the Jack Daniel’s. The shakes and sweats, nightmares, never able to sleep more than an hour at a time—it was just what happened to a body coming off whatever poisons were polluting its blood.”
― Jamie Quatro, Two-Step Devil

“All size and no modesty. That was the problem with America. It wasn’t enough to just drive somewhere, you had to make a big show and a lot of noise doing it.”
― Jamie Quatro, Two-Step Devil

“God’s seasons are not ours to understand.”
― Jamie Quatro, Two-Step Devil

“Here was God sitting above the circle of the Earth with people hopping around beneath him like grasshoppers; here were men looking at each other with their faces on fire, Jerusalem a woman in dirty skirts! In Ezekiel he read about the interlocking wheels with rims of eyeballs, and how the wheels followed after four creatures—man, lion, ox, and eagle. How it was the spirits of those creatures that made the wheels move. What he’d been seeing all these years was the Holy Spirit. The way the wheels behaved was a kind of checks-and-balances system by which he could tell if the Spirit was pleased. If the wheels were bright and moving toward him, it meant a vision would be coming on soon and he was God’s chosen instrument to receive it. If he saw only a smear of light, or, worst of all, darkness, he would lie on his belly and beg. Lord, Lord, he’d say. Don’t leave me to myself. Don’t do me like Saul and depart. In this way he learned how hard you had to work to keep the Spirit happy.”
― Jamie Quatro, Two-Step Devil

“Spirit housed in meat! the Prophet heard his own voice say. Eternity sealed up in clay jars!”
― Jamie Quatro, Two-Step Devil