Priestdaddy Quotes
"A priest can’t have a psychopath wife, it would bring disgrace."
"You wouldn’t want to bring disgrace to the Catholic Church."
"I passed it by being smarter than the test itself."
"I am neither shy nor self-conscious; I speak with authority."
"You were the kind of baby I could set down on a blanket and then come back three hours later and you hadn’t moved. That’s how I knew you were a thinker."
"The worst bad boy of all was St. Paul, and he fell off his horse and ended up in the Bible."
"I have always found it the easiest thing in the world to see my father as a baby, lolling on his back in the middle of fresh sheets, smoking a fat cigar."
"It’s not art if it’s evil," she said. "It’s only art if it’s evil, Mom."
"Your dad gets an F," Jason says, looking up the questions on his phone.
"Are you sure you have everything?" she asked as Jason started up the engine.
"When people started forgetting about gender roles, they started building ugly churches."
"I lusted after gnomes so strenuously I’m surprised I grew up to have sex with human beings."
"I shrink inch by inch until I am no longer an adult, but a baby toddling along in a comically oversized business suit."
"We eat angel food cake with strawberries and whipped cream, and drink prosecco my mother chills in the freezer."
"There’s a new kind of diarrhea, and it’s killing senior citizens."
"What is home? Is it a sort of lap of location, that exists only if certain conditions are in place?"
"Whimsy is chief among them. All night long, she answers the questions no one has asked."
"The world moves its scenery back and forth in front of the window; it has nothing to do with me; it is passing me by."
"I have always lived in these places, adjacent to the church and adjacent to its powers."
"It's just a bunch of call-in shows where people talk about whether something is a sin or not, and they almost always decide that it is, in fact, a sin."
"You can't listen to music all the time or else you get hit by a car. By my car."
"He was quite a large man; I’d say he weighed at least two hundred and eighty pounds."
"If the sad transmissions of Catholic radio ever reach the aliens, they will never even try to conquer us."
"I wouldn’t know a good idea if it ran over me while driving a two-ton black van called thegrindup.com."
"If you don’t rinse blueberries thoroughly, then you end up eating chemicals, and if you end up eating chemicals, you die twelve minutes sooner than you otherwise would have."
"No, it’s you. Remember the time you said, Fluent is in the ear of the beholder?"
"The only Christmas present I ever really wanted, besides various large marbles carved of semiprecious stone and purchased from the gift shop at the Natural History Museum, was a radio inside a stuffed cat."
"I still remember the look of bewilderment my father directed at me as I whispered "thank you" to my parents and then buried my face in the cat’s fur."
"It’s too Catholic! How can it be so Catholic! The Council of Trent wasn’t this Catholic!"
"If Stephen King knew about this Rag, he could write such a scary book."
"Get the Christ out of it! the enemy orders his troops, red and green lasers shooting out of his eyes."
"Despite ourselves, we are succumbing to the lure of Erzgebirge-Palace."
"A small figurine in the likeness of Charlie Chaplin also seems misguided."
"Her lust for nativity scenes is a hole that cannot be filled."
"Between books, a writer feels like an angel in that idle time between missions."
"I venture to suggest to Germany that making its nutcrackers in the shape of 'authority figures of the past' is not the best idea?"
"The best way to write poetry, in my experience, is to first fail spectacularly at singing."
"He had come to the stage when one realizes how difficult playing is going to be, but one cannot go back and not be musical, that is how one hears things and there is no help for it."
"It was the Movement, and for a while our whole lives were tied up with it."
"It was like they were using language just for each other. They said things that sounded like regular English, but they meant something secret, something only people in the group could understand."
"The house must have been like a women's commune. It must have been nice, everyone taking turns with the dishes, rocking each other's babies interchangeably."
"I had the same reaction when I first heard it. To this day, I’m always shocked to find out there is a word for something, as if I spent my first seven years in the forest sleeping next to a bone."
"We prayed so much, and were so determined to carry our crosses with good grace, that sometimes we took our suffering for granted."
"I was raised to think about the body. The body hung off a piece of carpentry at the front of the church; all my attention poured toward it."
"Sometimes I even find myself crouching, staring out the side window at the blue sky, silent and still."
"Death is one of those subjects where it’s worse to be glib than to be bad."
"To write about your mother and father is to tell the story of your own close call, to count all the ways you never should have existed."
"From the galaxy to the grain and back again. From the fingerprint to the grand design."
"Despite all the conspiracies of the universe, we are here; every moment we are here we arrive."
"I wanted to sleep in a bed that was just big enough for me and my own salvation."
"The sun had set while we were kneeling in the chapel, and the darkness smelled of curled leaf tips and keys."
"Two years later, I would be living in my own convent as an order of one, typing poetry in the deep glowing hours to a stranger."
"He is already missing that unifying force that keeps his life sound, sweet, and together; that spirit at work in his universe like a god of love."
"I resemble a log of haunted cookie dough, and I need to be cured of myself."
"She was exposed while cleaning out the barns and attics at the old family farm with her usual terrifying thoroughness."
"How to explain this moment to someone who never believed it, could never believe it? That bells ring, that the universe kneels, that what happened enters into the house of what is always happening, and sits with it together and eats at its table."
"Forget your gold sunburst and come downstairs, I think, but whole Bibles have been written about the man who wasn’t there, who appeared for some and never others, who was thunder in a cloud."
"Who among us doesn’t live in a nightgown or some other bare-ass outfit at the center of his own wide sky—shining, unchanging, without beginning or end, a word in the east and a body in the west?"