Andy Duncan (writer)

“It’s an insane idea, yes, but hell, this is war. If insanity works, a general is duty-bound to use it.”

“In everyone’s life there are crossroads, moments of decision, however insignificant. To spot the crucial moments in his life, and act, makes a great soldier. To spot the crucial moments on a larger scale, a grand scale—that’s the work of a general.”

“I went, shouted louder and louder, tried to clear my mind so that, when necessary, I could act without thinking, act like a soldier.”

““I don’t allow officers to mince words with me, Colonel. You must speak freely and frankly.”“General, they are ignoramuses.”“I believe the phrase you were groping for, Colonel, is goddamn worthless ignoramuses, but you’re definitely on the right track.”

“I asked Formosus how his trial was proceeding thus far.Less and less of God, and more and more of manIt is of God, as well, I replied. It is mad and pointless, and inefficient. It is godlike.”

“Oh, those sanctified fields and vineyards, always heard of but never seen! Surely there, we thought, the starving could pluck and eat in peace, free of the pious prattle that we choked down with our meals in Rome.In this we were correct. As I rose higher in the church, the meals grew more substantial and the piety less burdensome. I saw the lame and the dying leaping like frogs around a finger bone that had been fondling a milkmaid not two weeks before.”

“Stephen knew I first served the Church by stocking reliquaries—transmuting unused bits of rotting paupers into the toes and teeth of saints.”

“People will say bout anything. That don’t mean I have to believe it. What I see with my own eyes, that I believe.”

“Mr. Davis was a Senator, you know, before he became a professional Southerner, and a Senator can out-talk any man—can make you think a horse-chestnut is a chestnut horse.”

“I knew this way well. It was the track to the praying ground, where are the colored folks on that part of St. Helena met to have their Christian worship, far from white men and their devilments. What there is bout a colored church service that so riles up the white trash, I didn’t know then and I don’t know now, cept maybe they hate to see us going straight to the true Master, you know, and skipping the middleman.”

“She didn’t look around as I slammed the front door and locked it, just like I promised I’d do—cept I was outside the door, on the porch, when I done it.”

“Max, you are a melodrama with no audience and a cast of one!”

““Ain’t my business,” I said. Like always, I was waiting to see how it was.“That’s right, John, it ain’t your business,” the devil said. “Nothing I do is any of your business, John, but everything you do is mine.””