James K. Morrow Quotes

“It was the most portentous mission since Saul of Tarsus has suffered an epileptic seizure and called it Christianity.”

Source: Only Begotten Daughter (1990), Chapter 5 (p. 88)

“I’ve gone insane, Michael decided, retrieving a cowhide-bound appointments book from his valise. Only certifiable schizophrenics showed meetings with God on their calendars.”

Source: Towing Jehovah (1994), Chapter 4, “Dirge” (p. 73)

“As with the rest of Phoebe’s species, Julie must not let her become dependent upon supernatural solutions, trading one addiction for another.”

"Bible Stories for Adults, No. 20: The Tower" p. 68 (originally published in Author’s Choice Monthly #8: Swatting at the Cosmos)
Short fiction, Bible Stories for Adults (1996)

“Tez always had warm feelings about paradoxes. It was the scientist in her.”

Source: Only Begotten Daughter (1990), Chapter 7 (p. 133)

“The real reason Charles Darwin distresses people, I would argue, is not that he stumbled on an argument against theism. No, the problem was that he replaced theism—replaced it with a construct more beautiful and majestic than any account of the Supreme Being outside the Book of Job, a construct that invites us to see every variety of life, from aphids to archbishops, zygotes to zoologists, as vibrant threads in an epic tapestry, its warp and woof stretching across the eons and back to the Precambrian ooze, the seminal sea-vents, the primordial clay-pits, or wherever it all began. An astonishing construct, a mind-boggling construct, a construct of which Jehovah is understandably and insanely jealous.”

Source: The Wine of Violence (1981), Chapter 11 (p. 132)

“Being God, I must choose My words carefully. People, I’ve noticed, tend to hang on to My every remark. It gets annoying, this servile and sycophantic streak in Homo sapiens sapiens. There’s a difference, after all, between tasteful adulation and arrant toadyism, but they just don’t get it.”

Source: The Philosopher's Apprentice (2008), Chapter 17 (p. 401)

James K. Morrow Quotes about God

““You see God as an engineer?” asked Urpastor Phelps.
“I don’t see God as anything at all.”
“An engineer, you said. An incompetent engineer.”
“Incompetent, perfect, who knows? God is whatever we agree to pretend God is. God is our image of God.””

"Bible Stories for Adults, No. 20: The Tower" p. 61 (originally published in Author’s Choice Monthly #8: Swatting at the Cosmos)
Short fiction, Bible Stories for Adults (1996)

“You wouldn’t like him. Major fanatic. Confuses migraine headaches with God.”

Source: Only Begotten Daughter (1990), Chapter 16 (p. 272)

“It’s an old story, perhaps the oldest on earth,” Joan said. “The sky rumbles, the clouds congeal, the sun spasms. Is that a saint I see on high? An angel? The Lord God Jehovah himself? Now a holy voice booms down, instructing the poor prophet to grab a sword and thrust it into a fellow human, or perhaps a hundred fellow humans, or even a million if the cause is sufficiently sacred. The prophet never talks back. The tradition existed before me. It flourishes to this day. The sword, the blood, the freshly created corpses littering the battlefield, exuding the stink of epiphany.”

Source: Only Begotten Daughter (1990), Chapter 4 (p. 84)

“Curse God, and die. To George it seemed like remarkably sage and relevant advice.”

Source: The Philosopher's Apprentice (2008), Chapter 10 (p. 243)

“I know the God hypothesis has its partisans, but, oh, what a boring idea. Where did the universe come from? He did it. How do we account for rivers and rocks and ring-tailed lemurs? He made them. Ho-hum.”

Source: This Is the Way the World Ends (1986), Chapter 6, “In Which a Sea Captain, a General, a Therapist, and a Man of God Enter the Tale” (p. 61)

“Someday that man will be astonished to discover there’s a whole world marching along outside his buzzing head.”

Source: The Philosopher's Apprentice (2008), Chapter 5 (p. 108)

James K. Morrow Quotes about the world

“The fission bomb was a costly mistress. Consider, your Honors. In 1979 this planet celebrated the International Year of the Child. Of the one hundred and twenty-two million children born that year, one of every ten was dead by 1982, and most died for lack of inexpensive food and vaccines. Yet in 1982 the world spent one trillion dollars on weapons. One trillion dollars!”

Source: The Wine of Violence (1981), Chapter 11 (p. 136)

“She was by some standards slovenly, failing to see any virtue in made beds, since, as she put it, you are either asleep or somewhere else. On her birthdays she was sad. This tradition traced to earliest childhood, when she had consistently misinterpreted her birthday parties to mean that she was dying. Why else would the world be going to such exorbitant lengths to cheer her up?
Science was her first love. Long after the preschool years, she aspired to know the why of everything. Why babies had a Babinski reflex, and why the reflex disappeared. Why people licked their upper lips when concentrating, and why there was humor. Tez wanted to understand light. She wanted to solve mud, decipher rocks, and unlock grass.”

Source: This Is the Way the World Ends (1986), Chapter 12, “In Which It Is Shown that the End of the World Was More Necessary than Previously Supposed” (pp. 156-157)

“As Jean-Paul Sartre reminds us, in the case of human beings this metaphysic is reversed: a person’s existence precedes his essence—he is a subject among objects. The danger, says Sartre, following Heidegger, is that he will “fall” into the world of objects, becoming ever after the prisoner of arbitrary strictures masquerading as universal principles.”

Source: The Wine of Violence (1981), Chapter 4 (p. 48)

“What enormous potential for intermittent happiness the world offered.”

Source: The Philosopher's Apprentice (2008), Chapter 3 (p. 47)

“I’ve been good, I’ve been bad—nothing gets her attention. What am I supposed to do, sacrifice a goat?”
“Perhaps you should start a religion. You know—reveal your mother to the world.”
“How can I reveal her when I don’t know what she’s like?”

Source: Only Begotten Daughter (1990), Chapter 2 (p. 37)

“People found ever more ingenious ways to hate each other.”

“Use your imagination. Everybody else does.”
Source: Only Begotten Daughter (1990), Chapter 4 (p. 84)

James K. Morrow: Trending quotes

“Many are the consolations of literature, and not the least such solace occurs when an annoyingly virtuous hero succumbs to carnal temptation.”

Source: The Wine of Violence (1981), Chapter 1 (p. 12)

“Never underestimate the value of a falsehood, friends. Never doubt the power of a lie. Blessed are the mendacious, for they shall grow wealthy beyond their wildest dreams.”

Source: The Philosopher's Apprentice (2008), Chapter 11 (p. 245)

“Gravestones, he knew, were educational media, teaching that life has limits: don’t set your sights too high.”

Source: Blameless in Abaddon (1996), Chapter 2 (p. 42; spoken by the Devil)

James K. Morrow Quotes

“Zolmec,” said Nazra, “has always taught that the greatest words are ‘I could very well be wrong.’”

Source: This Is the Way the World Ends (1986), Chapter 1, “In Which Our Hero Is Introduced and Taught the True Facts Concerning Strategic Doctrine and Civil Defense” (p. 14)

“The problem is, only a few people get to be scientists. You see the dilemma? Given the choice between a truth they can appreciate and a lie they can live, most people will take you-know-what.”

Source: The Wine of Violence (1981), Chapter 15 (p. 185)

“JOB. And now it’s time…
FRANNY. To curse God…
JOB. And live.”

Source: Only Begotten Daughter (1990), Chapter 7 (p. 138)

““Ah, yes, the spiritual realm.” In those days “spiritual” was my least favorite word. It still is.”

"Bible Stories for Adults, No. 46: The Soap Opera" p. 184 (originally published in Science Fiction Age, January 1994; ellipses in the original)
Short fiction, Bible Stories for Adults (1996)

“Late in my senior year, I went through a crisis of doubt when my provisional girlfriend, a willowy physics major named Morgan Piziks, informed me at the end of our fourth date that anybody seriously in the question “Why?” should look not to philosophy but to the physical sciences—to cosmology, quantum mechanics, molecular biology, and the periodic table of the elements.
My mind went blank. Try as I might, I could contrive no riposte. I felt instinctively that Morgan’s claim enjoyed the nontrivial virtue of being true.”

Source: The Philosopher's Apprentice (2008), Chapter 7 (p. 141)

““It’s tragic,” he said.
“God killed them with His hurricane,” she said.
“God had nothing to do with it.”
“Actually I agree with you, though for reasons quite different from yours.””

Source: The Philosopher's Apprentice (2008), Chapter 1 (p. 8)

“What good is it having God for a mother if she never sends you a birthday card?”

Source: Towing Jehovah (1994), Chapter 4, “Dirge” (p. 69)

“To Thomas’s eye, Union Square combined the exoticism of The Arabian Nights with the bedrock banality of American commerce, as if a medieval Persian bazaar had been transplanted to the twentieth century and taken over by Wal-Mart.”

Source: Only Begotten Daughter (1990), Chapter 3 (p. 50)

“Naturally you expect the moral thing from me. But I’ve learned something, friend. Morals don’t count for a hell of a lot in this galaxy. I rank them somewhere between straight teeth and the ability to carry a tune.”

Source: Towing Jehovah (1994), Chapter 2, “Priest” (p. 29)

““Talo, it would appear that our sons are growing up.”
She tut-tutted in mock solemnity. “And we always said, ‘It can’t happen here.’””

Source: The Wine of Violence (1981), Chapter 26 (p. 303)

“Is there anything quite so ludicrous as two intellectuals grappling in a philosophy-department parking lot? Each of us wanted to pummel the other to a pulp, but neither knew how to go about it.”

Source: The Wine of Violence (1981), Chapter 25 (p. 296)

““Another boyfriend?”
“A character in one of my plays. Runkleberg’s my twentieth-century Abraham. One fine morning he’s out watering his roses, and he hears God’s voice telling him to sacrifice his son.”
“Does he obey?”
“His wife intervenes.”
“How?”
“She castrates him with his hedge clippers, and he bleeds to death.””

Source: The Philosopher's Apprentice (2008), Chapter 9 (p. 215)

“That was a very pretty speech,” said Loloc, “but if it contained an answer to even one of my questions then I did not hear it.”

Source: Towing Jehovah (1994), Chapter 4, “Dirge” (p. 71)

“There’s no objective evidence for an afterlife, and anecdotal reports of heaven cannot be distinguished from wishful thinking, self-delusion, and the effects of oxygen loss on the brain.”

Source: The Wine of Violence (1981), Chapter 15 (p. 178)

“People are always asking, does God exist? Of course she does. The real question: what is she like?”

City of Truth as reprinted in Nebula Awards 28, p. 257
Short fiction

“A second slash ended the monster’s misery. So, he thought, this is how my Earthling ancestors ran their affairs. This is how lands were won, empires expanded, insurrections resisted, prisoners taken, slaves kept, heretics converted, captives made loquacious. For the first time in his life, Minnix felt himself a part of history.
History, he decided, was a terrible idea.”

Source: Only Begotten Daughter (1990), Chapter 4 (p. 69)

““Your disciples will expect something even grander from you. They’ll want you to become a deity.”
She snickered and said, “I’m not ruling out that possibility.”
“What sort of deity? A hamadryad? Plato’s demiurge? The Creator God of Judeo-Christian revelation?”
“That job’s already taken,” she said.
“But you could do it better,” I said.
“When it comes to the physics, no, but in other areas—you’re right.””

Source: The Wine of Violence (1981), Chapter 18 (p. 223)

“What really got under Londa’s skin, I soon learned, was not the Messiah’s sermon per se but the discontinuity between its sublime directives and the ignominious course of Western history, a spectacle that, the more we thought about it, increasingly struck Londa and me as largely a fancy-dress danse macabre, Titus Andronicus on a hemispheric and ultimately global scale, though I hastened to point out that the chronicles of other civilizations were likewise awash in blood. What had gone wrong? She wanted to know. When and why had the teachings of Jesus Christ become an optional component of Christianity?”

Source: The Philosopher's Apprentice (2008), Chapter 13 (pp. 304-305)

““In the end Humankind destroyed the heaven and the earth,” Soapstone began…
“And Humankind said, ‘Let there be security,’ and there was security. And Humankind tested the security, that it would detonate. And Humankind divided the U-235 from the U-238. And the evening and the morning were the first strike.” Soapstone looked up from the book. “Some commentators feel that the author should have inserted, ‘And Humankind saw the security, that it was evil.’ Others point out that such a view was not universally shared.”…
Casting his eyes heavenward, Soapstone continued. “And Humankind said, ‘Let there be a holocaust in the midst of the dry land.’ And Humankind poisoned the aquifers that were below the dry land and scorched the ozone that was above the dry land. And the evening and the morning were the second strike.”…
“And Humankind said, ‘Let the ultraviolet light destroy the food chains that bring forth the moving creature!’ And the evening and the morning—”…
“And Humankind said, ‘Let there be rays in the firmament to fall upon the survivors!’ And Humankind made two great rays, the greater gamma radiation to give penetrating whole-body doses, and the lesser beta radiation to burn the plants and the bowels of animals! And Humankind sterilized each living creature, saying, ‘Be fruitless, and barren, and cease to—’””

Source: The Philosopher's Apprentice (2008), Chapter 6 (pp. 128-129)

“Then there is the final possibility, my favorite.
—Yes?
—The final possibility is that I’m God.
—You’re God?
—Just a theory, but the data are provocative. I mean, look at me. Faceless, shapeless, holey, undifferentiated, Jewish, inscrutable…and a hermaphrodite to boot. Years ago, I told you sponges cannot be fatally dismembered, for each part quickly becomes the whole. To wit, I am both immortal and infinite.
—You’re God? You’re God herself? You?
—The data are provocative.
—God is a sponge? A sponge? There’s not much comfort in that.
—Agreed.
—Sponges can’t help us.
—Neither can God, as far as I can tell. I’d be happy to see some contrary data.”

Source: This Is the Way the World Ends (1986), Chapter 9, “In Which by Taking a Step Backward the City of New York Brings Our Hero a Step Forward” (pp. 115-116; ellipses not in the original)

“Nature may not be benign, but she is reliable.”

Source: Only Begotten Daughter (1990), Chapter 18 (p. 312)

“Forgive me if I’m confusing you with logic.”

Source: The Wine of Violence (1981), Chapter 13 (p. 157)

““A golden age, Londa calls it. She hopes it will return.”
“Golden ages rarely return,” I said “especially if they never existed.””

Source: The Wine of Violence (1981), Chapter 13 (p. 157)

“I shall never cease to marvel at the clarity of stars when viewed from midocean, each as sharp and bright as the laser pointer God uses when lecturing the angels on evolution.”

Source: The Philosopher's Apprentice (2008), Chapter 16 (p. 366)

“Like all good friends, they hated seeing their relationship lose its emotional innocence, its chastity of good will, and now that the thing was lost, now that searing statements had changed hands and left scars, neither looked forward to the future.”

Source: The Philosopher's Apprentice (2008), Chapter 14 (p. 333)

“Every religion says war is evil, but one way or another they end up playing along.”

Source: The Wine of Violence (1981), Chapter 14 (p. 160)

“Monotheism is just one of the myths by which we live, and Yahweh is just one of the deities who populate these stories.”

Source: The Wine of Violence (1981), Chapter 14 (p. 164)

“Babies are like kittens, Julie, they grow into something much more sinister.”

Preface
Short fiction, Bible Stories for Adults (1996)

““You see, Ebenezer, charity begs a crucial question. How did the bestower attain the position from which he now exercises his largesse?” My dead colleague cleaned his teeth with one of his many appended keys. “Through imagination and merit? Or through inherited privilege and ruthless exploitation?””

Source: Only Begotten Daughter (1990), Chapter 15 (p. 258)

“I figure that, given our “thrownness,” as Heidegger called it, we should work hard to become as bewildered as possible by this strange state of affairs, asking the most impertinent and audacious questions we can imagine. To do otherwise—and instead hand over the mystery of it all to dubious cults of expertise—is to waste one’s life, I feel.”

"The Confessions of Ebenezer Scrooge" p. 158 (originally published in Spirits of Christmas: Twenty Otherworldly Tales, edited by Kathryn Cramer and David G. Hartwell)
Short fiction, Bible Stories for Adults (1996)

“Fair are the daughters of men, and fairest are those who read. Is there any creature more desirable than a damsel in intellectual distress?”

Source: The Philosopher's Apprentice (2008), P. S. (p. 14)

“As with all things political, the issue was power.”

Source: The Philosopher's Apprentice (2008), Chapter 8 (pp. 171-172)

“Let’s just hope that gravity isn’t as heavy as it used to be…”

"Abe Lincoln in McDonald’s" p. 140 (originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, May 1989)
Short fiction, Bible Stories for Adults (1996)

“For moral reasons, the young Reverend Peter Sparrow declined to join the Saturday night gatherings of the Erebus Poker Club. Gambling, he knew, was Satan’s third favorite pastime, after sex and ecumenicalism.”

Source: The Wine of Violence (1981), Chapter 1 (p. 8)

“Right before bed, I spend twenty minutes in this place. Then I can sleep.”
“You mean you simply sit here, staring at everybody’s pain? All you do is look at it?”

Source: This Is the Way the World Ends (1986), Chapter 8, “In Which Our Hero Witnesses Some of the Many Surprising Effects of Nuclear War, Including Sundeath, Timefolds, and Unadmittance” (p. 97)

“My spirits rose: I could see the photon at the end of the tunnel.”

“Uh-huh. Just like God.”
Source: Only Begotten Daughter (1990), Chapter 4 (p. 74)

“She had long ago accepted the fact that, when it came to the affectations with which radical feminists liked to impoverish their minds—crystal therapy, neo-paganism, Wicca—her skepticism placed her emphatically in a minority.”

Source: The Philosopher's Apprentice (2008), Chapter 3 (p. 43)

“My friends in the nouveau paganism camp accuse me of quaintness: Bible thumpers are straw men, so why bother?…My answer is that straw men, once set aflame with zeal, can be quite dangerous, and that the gap between New Age irrationalism and Christian fundamentalism is not nearly so wide as we might wish to believe.”

Source: Towing Jehovah (1994), Chapter 4, “Dirge” (p. 72)