HUMAN LONELINESS before an insufficient god.
“I only want a patron saint to protect me. / I only want someone else to bleed.”
⁃ Natalie Scenters-Zapico, from “Paper Cuts,”
“The failures of powerful invisible protectors—be they saints or gods—could and should be punished.”
⁃ Robert Bartlett, Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation
JUDAS: Why … didn’t you make me good enough … so that you could’ve loved me?
⁃ Stephen Adly Guirgis, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot
“At the trial of God, we will ask: why did you allow all this? / And the answer will be an echo: why did you allow all this?”
⁃ Ilya Kaminsky, death republic
Milton’s Devil as a moral being is as far superior to his God, as one who perseveres in some purpose which he has conceived to be excellent in spite of adversity and torture, is to one who in the cold security of undoubted triumph inflicts the most horrible revenge upon his enemy, not from any mistaken notion of inducing him to repent of a perseverance in enmity, but with the alleged design of exasperating him to deserve new torments.
⁃ Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry
“If there is a God, He will have to beg my forgiveness.”
⁃ Unknown jewish prisoner, on the walls of the jails of Mauthausen concentration camp















