Ride the Pink Horse Quotes

“He didn't pay any attention to anything but the white-and-silver girl down in front. She belonged here; she was like something holy, like one of the altar candles, like an angel. He didn't pay any attention to the altar. There were priests up there chanting the litany; their white-and-gold benediction vestments draped over the red velvet chairs. There was a choir of seminarians singing. Singing the responses. Their faces were foreign like the town; brown Mexican faces, somber, and their voices, unaccompanied were like a heaven choir. He didn't care about that. He hadn't come here to pray; he'd come with a gun to keep his eye on a rat. He wasn't going to be sucked in by holiness.”
― Dorothy B. Hughes, Ride the Pink Horse

“The church was only round the corner and they made it as the last bell was an echo, marching down the aisle together, the old man and the old lady and the kids, the eight kids. Eight kids and not enough bread for one. Kneeling together, praying together, marching out again into the cold gloomy Chicago Sunday. The hot sweating Chicago Sunday.
“It’s a fine family you have there, Mr...”
The old man puffing himself up and accepting the compliments on the church steps and the old lady smirking timidly and fingering her worn black gloves. She blacked them with shoe blacking on Saturday nights. The kids standing like clodhoppers with their welts itching under their sawtoothed winter underwear, under their sweaty summer floursacks.
The priest in his stained cassock looking like a pale, pious, nearsighted Saint. Saints didn’t belong in a slum church; there ought to have been a fighting priest like an avenging angel with a fiery sword. To whack the old man down. To strike the old man and his sanctimonious Sunday smile dead on the church steps”
― Dorothy B. Hughes, Ride the Pink Horse

“Black rage shook him. He hadn’t had a place to sleep, he hadn’t had food, he couldn’t even get a beer in this goddamn stinking lousy town. He was ready to turn and walk out when he saw wedged at a table against a wall, McIntyre. In the same silly hat, the red sash. Mac hadn’t seen him yet. Mac was watching the dance floor. Sailor knew then that the Sen was here. The Sen and Iris Towers. He took his stance in the room.”
― Dorothy B. Hughes, Ride the Pink Horse