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“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.”

James K. Morrow

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

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

James K. Morrow

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

“What most people don’t realize is that something unprecedented has entered the world. Bang—science—and suddenly a proposition is true because it’s true, Julie, not because its adherents have the biggest churches or the grandest inquisitors or the most weeks on The New York Times bestseller list.”

James K. Morrow book Only Begotten Daughter

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

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

James K. Morrow book Towing Jehovah

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

“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.”

James K. Morrow

"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)

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

James K. Morrow book Only Begotten Daughter

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

“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.”

James K. Morrow

"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)

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

James K. Morrow

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

“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.”

James K. Morrow

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

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

James K. Morrow

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.”

James K. Morrow

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)

““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.””

James K. Morrow book Only Begotten Daughter

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

“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!”

James K. Morrow

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)

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

James K. Morrow

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

“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.”

James K. Morrow book Only Begotten Daughter

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

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

James K. Morrow

"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)

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

James K. Morrow

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

“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.”

James K. Morrow

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

““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.””

James K. Morrow book Towing Jehovah

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

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

James K. Morrow book Only Begotten Daughter

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