Jamie Quatro > Quotes

“C. S. Lewis says that if we were able to return to the locus of our nostalgia, the place or person or spot of time in which we experienced joy, we would find only more nostalgia. As far back as we could go—a view from a childhood window, patterned light on a nursery wall—we would find only an unsatisfied desire that is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. An indication not of the illusion of our existence, but of its ultimate reality elsewhere. A home we once knew but can’t quite remember, to which we will someday return.”
― Jamie Quatro, Fire Sermon

“In the support group, the counselor had said: When you lose a loved one, you feel as if you're inside a confined space. Everyone else will seem to be careening along outside of this space. In time, you will become aware of an opening you are going to have to step through. It might be the touch of a new lover, a new job, a move--but you'll know. You will step through.”
― Jamie Quatro, I Want to Show You More

“Raised in love, money, and the certainty of God’s favor—money the indication of God’s favor, an idea so insidious she won’t recognize it till she’s in her forties.”
― Jamie Quatro, Fire Sermon

“The safe way to let yourself fall in love with someone who isn't your spouse: imagine the life you might have together after both your spouses have passed away.”
― Jamie Quatro, Fire Sermon

“The next morning, between services, in an alcove space used for private prayer, Heinrich confessed to an elder that he had succumbed to the temptation of lust and could no longer be of service to the church. He said that he had seen more of God's glory in the body of a half-naked girl than in the worship services of thirty years combined. That he would like to continue mediating on the glory of God in this fashion.”
― Jamie Quatro, I Want to Show You More

“the stance of friends (side by side looking ahead to a shared horizon) versus lovers (side by side looking at one another)”
― Jamie Quatro, Fire Sermon

“I envy these people. Wide-open suffering, their messes all hanging out. Lives boiled down to raw need--a near-holiness to it. And all of us driving our cars up and down the mountain--we'll go on forever trying to fool each other.”
― Jamie Quatro, I Want to Show You More

“And because I only know arousal within love—because I’ve never separated emotion from body—is my pattern to create a pretend love first, over and over, in order to feel desire, and desirable?)”
― Jamie Quatro, Fire Sermon

“God’s seasons are not ours to understand.”
― 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

“What if you woke one day to discover the corpse of Christ has been identified definitively? Or that an irrefutable, airtight scientific study had been devised to disprove the existence of God, and the study had - beyond any conceivable doubt - proved he did not exist? What would you feel?

Relief”
― Jamie Quatro, Fire Sermon

“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

“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

“That summer we fell in love and decided to get married. When I got back to Cleveland we had an argument over the telephone. Something silly, I don't remember what. But I was rude. I insulted him and hung up. I was too proud to be the one to call back and apologize; I wanted him to call first. I waited a year but he never called. I married your grandpa Jack to spite Don, and when Jack died so young, I didn't remarry - not because, as I always told your father, I could never love anyone as much as I loved Jack, but because I hoped Donald and I might someday find one another again. Which of course we never did.

Well, my darling, now you know. I embroidered one hankie a month the year I waited for the telephone to ring. I should like it very much if you kept them. Perhaps they'll remind you to always be the one to call back first.”
― Jamie Quatro, Fire Sermon

“(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

“A woman becomes more attractive as she ages only if she’s married, a male professor once told her. It means you have something another man wanted, and still wants. It’s single women who don’t age well.”
― Jamie Quatro, Fire Sermon

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

“I walked under the arch—Empire State Building in front, Freedom Tower behind—glorious to be here, on this day, some new beat in my vascular system, an anticipatory cadence that matched the wider pulse of traffic and construction noise. Life, life. Manhattan was saying it. In the interstices between tragedies, the spaces between the arrowing buildings, the rush of air in alleyways and tunnels, breezes across rooftops, life. So much sweat and energy absorbed by the inanimate, I thought, if you removed every human from this island the stones would cry out. Faulkner said the East and Middlewest—New York, Chicago—are young because they’re alive, the South old because it’s dead. Killed by the Civil War. Maybe that was what I felt. I’d come up from Nashville to find myself among the living.”
― Jamie Quatro, Fire Sermon

“We should be no more afraid of ceasing to exist after we die than we're afraid we didn't exist before we were born.”
― Jamie Quatro, I Want to Show You More

“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

“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

“You're my agenda - the day the light changed, the air turned liquid.”
― Jamie Quatro, Fire Sermon

“What if you woke one day to discover the corpse of Christ has been identified definitely. Or that an irrefutable, airtight scientific study had been devised to disprove the existence of God, and the study had - beyond any conceivable doubt - proved he did not exist? What would you feel?

Relief.”
― Jamie Quatro, Fire Sermon

“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

“What if it's the acquisition you're in love with, not the person? What if your so-called love for James, once exhausted, begins to dissipate, then transfers itself to the next in line?”
― Jamie Quatro, Fire Sermon

“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

“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

“But before he was the Prophet, Winston was a regular devil like the rest.”
― 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