James K. Morrow: Trending quotes (page 3)

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

James K. Morrow book Only Begotten Daughter

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

World , Happiness

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

James K. Morrow

Preface
Short fiction, Bible Stories for Adults (1996)

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

James K. Morrow book Only Begotten Daughter

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

Baby

““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?””

James K. Morrow

"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)

Exercises , Imagination , Question , Dead

“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.”

James K. Morrow

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

Life , Feeling , Imagination , Question

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

James K. Morrow

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

Men , Reading , Daughters

“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.”

James K. Morrow

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

Love , People , World , Sadness

“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.”

James K. Morrow

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

World , Universe , Personality

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

James K. Morrow

"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)

“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?”

James K. Morrow book Only Begotten Daughter

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

World , Religion , Imagination

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

James K. Morrow

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

Hope

“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.”

James K. Morrow

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)

Sex , Night

“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?”

James K. Morrow book Only Begotten Daughter

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

God , Pain , Sleep

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

James K. Morrow

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)

God

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

James K. Morrow

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