Fellow saints and sinners, I’m starting a (like most things here) irregular series called “Quotes of the Week.”  These are just various snippets of wit and charm I run across during the week, and that I’ve not had time to write a deeper reflection on but which struck me and which I want to remember for future use.  Who knows, you may find them memorable or eye-opening, too:

After the first 3 episodes of “True Detective” this week (with Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson)…

To realize that all your life – all your love, all your hate, all your memory, all your pain, it was all the same thing. It was all the same dream, a dream that you had inside a locked room. A dream about bein’ a person…. And like a lot of dreams, there’s a monster at the end of it.—Detective Rust Cohle investigating a grisly murder

***

Cohle: People out here, it’s like they don’t even know the outside world exists. Might as well be living on the f**g Moon.

Martin Hart (Cohle’s partner): There’s all kinds of ghettos in the world.

Cohle: It’s all one ghetto man, giant gutter in outer space.

***

Cohle: Transference of fear and self-loathing to an authoritarian vessel. It’s catharsis. He absorbs their dread with his narrative. Because of this, he’s effective at proportion to the amount of certainty he can project. Certain linguistic anthropologists think that religion is a language virus that rewrites pathways in the brain. Dulls critical thinking. (Cohle bantering with his partner Hart at a tent revival meeting)

Hart: Well, I don’t use ten dollar words as much as you, but for a guy who sees no point in existence, you sure fret about it an awful lot; and you still sound panicked.

Cohle: At least I’m not racing to a red light. 

***

Laughter is the closest thing to the grace of God. —Karl Barth

But are you saved?…When were you saved? – An elderly hospice patient

Absence is the first form of knowing. -Psychotherapist James Hillman via author of The Presence of Absence Doris Grumbach, quoted by Tom Montgomery Fate in the June 25 issue of The Christian Century