Pulling the Wings Off Angels Quotes

“There's nothing quite like the scriptures for killing faith stone dead. Actually reading them and thinking about what they said evaporated my belief like spit on a hot stove.”
― K.J. Parker, Pulling the Wings Off Angels

“Mercy isn't fair, it means someone getting away with what he did because the Boss feels sorry for him. Justice is fair. Justice puts people in prison. Mercy lets them out again. Of course mercy isn't fair. It's breaking all the rules.”
― K.J. Parker, Pulling the Wings Off Angels

“That's the thing about belief, you can't make yourself do it. It's like falling asleep or being in love. You can lie there all night desperately wanting to go to sleep, and the more you want the more it doesn't happen. You can really, really want to believe, but if you don't you just don't.”
― K.J. Parker, Pulling the Wings Off Angels

“He's perfect, so He must be like us and not a bit like them across the border. He thinks like us, obviously; He likes what we like and hates what we hate, and here's Scripture (recorded, translated, and edited by us) to prove it. The possibility that He might not see things the way we do never enters into our heads, because we're His people and the sheep of His pasture, made by Him according to His specifications, so clearly the way we are is the way He thinks the ideal human being ought to be, so what we intuitively believe must automatically be right. Simple logic.”
― K.J. Parker, Pulling the Wings Off Angels

“My own words betray the fact that I apparently believe in luck, at some visceral level. Luck would have to be some external agency powerful enough to control what happens; in which case, it meets the basic criteria for being God. In other regards, of course, it has little to do with the form that God conventionally takes. It doesn’t seem to worry about whether or not you’ve been good; nor does it give a damn if you pray to it. It’s there for a while, and then it goes away again. I think of it as the way everything in the house shakes when one of those heavy carts loaded with slate goes by on the way up from the quarries. The cart has its own agenda, which has nothing at all to do with me, but it makes my house shake, which affects me, so understandably and misguidedly I take it personally.”
― K.J. Parker, Pulling the Wings Off Angels