James K. Morrow Quotes (166 quotes, page 2)

"Bible Stories for Adults, No. 20: The Tower" p. 76 (originally published in Author’s Choice Monthly #8: Swatting at the Cosmos)
Short fiction, Bible Stories for Adults (1996)

Understanding , Personality

“Let us examine the language here. Evidently God is addressing this code to a patriarchy that will in turn disseminate it among the less powerful, namely wives and servants. And how long before these servants are downgraded further still…into slaves, even? Ten whole commandments, and not one word against slavery, not to mention bigotry, misogyny, or war.”

James K. Morrow

"Bible Stories for Adults, No. 31: The Covenant" p. 130 (originally published in What Might Have Been? Volume 1: Alternate Empires, edited by Gregory Benford and Martin H. Greenberg)
Short fiction, Bible Stories for Adults (1996)

God , War

“The universe,” says Wyvern, “is a Ph. D. thesis that God was unable to successfully defend.”

James K. Morrow book Only Begotten Daughter

Source: Only Begotten Daughter (1990), Chapter 13 (p. 221)

God , Universe

“Maybe I’ll end up on the fun side of her pants some day.”

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. 66)

“What I love about fiction is the way this form of expression allows an author to wrestle an idea to the ground, as opposed to the bumper-sticker dialectics that pass for political and philosophical discourse in most sectors of our culture. In the age of mass communication, we need the quiet, contemplative and often ambiguous medium of the novel more than ever.”

James K. Morrow

Source: The Philosopher's Apprentice (2008), P. S. (p. 13)

Love , Age , Way , Communication

“Children, being close to the ground, have a special rapport with insects.”

James K. Morrow

Source: The Wine of Violence (1981), Chapter 2 (p. 17)

Children

“There’s nothing quite so pernicious as wishful thinking.”

James K. Morrow book Towing Jehovah

Source: Towing Jehovah (1994), Chapter 11, “War” (p. 285)

Thinking

“Although Bix Constantine disbelieved in hell as intensely as he did in heaven, he knew what the place would be like. Hell, for Bix, was jealousy. It was failed journalists seeing their enemies receive Pulitzer Prizes. It was compulsive gamblers seeing jackpots gush from adjacent players’ slot machines and sex-starved young men seeing their friends piled high with naked cheerleaders.”

James K. Morrow book Only Begotten Daughter

Source: Only Begotten Daughter (1990), Chapter 8 (p. 144)

Men , Jealousy , Sex , Hell

“Imagine that a team of neuroscientists has just unveiled a technology that lets a person remove all trace of some terrible experience from his brain. Under what conditions, if any, would you use it? What might it be like to go through life knowing you’d once suffered an ordeal so dreadful that it demanded radical excision? How long could you endure this strange affirmative ignorance, this lost access to the unspeakable, without becoming neurotic, or even slightly mad? In the long run, might you not decide that such circumscribed amnesia was worse than whatever memory you’d felt compelled to erase?”

James K. Morrow

Source: The Philosopher's Apprentice (2008), Chapter 17 (p. 400)

Life , Imagination , Suffering , Memory

“If You intervene too profusely in Earth’s affairs, I’ve noticed, the inhabitants become chronically distracted, and they forget to worship You.”

James K. Morrow

"Bible Stories for Adults, No. 20: The Tower" p. 67 (originally published in Author’s Choice Monthly #8: Swatting at the Cosmos)
Short fiction, Bible Stories for Adults (1996)

Forgetting

“She asked, “Do you believe science has all the answers?”
“Huh?”
“Science. Does it have all the answers?”
“Everybody thinks he’s being oh-so-deep when he says science doesn’t have all the answers.”
Done. All of it. Virginity gone, flesh ratified, mother spited, mission discovered—the gospel of empirical truth! Yes! Oh, yes!
“Science does have all the answers,” said Howard, withdrawing. “The problem is that we don’t have all the science.””

James K. Morrow book Only Begotten Daughter

Source: Only Begotten Daughter (1990), Chapter 5 (p. 90)

Truth , Problem , Thinking , Science

“Often Burne found himself saying, “I don’t think you would make a very good soldier,” and with grating predictability he heard that he wouldn’t make a very good pacifist.”

James K. Morrow

Source: The Wine of Violence (1981), Chapter 16 (p. 188)

Thinking

“I wish more English teachers helped their students engage the classics at the level of raw delight, instead of putting them on the scent of symbols. A novel is not a cryptogram.”

James K. Morrow

Source: The Philosopher's Apprentice (2008), P. S. (p. 15)

Teachers , Help

“Life’s meaning doesn’t come from God! Life’s meaning comes from life!”

James K. Morrow book Towing Jehovah

Source: Towing Jehovah (1994), Chapter 7, “Island” (p. 178)

Life , God

“Recent biblical exegesis by Anthem’s newest organization, Hermeneutics Unlimited, had established beyond doubt that Jesus Christ was adamantly opposed to universal health-care insurance, class-action lawsuits, and corporate whistleblowers. Several prominent postrationalist theologians had successfully exposed public education for the misguided Marxist boondoggle it was, while a majority in Congress now advocated replacing the secular school system with private academies committed to sparing children the bad news that Charles Darwin had brought back from the Galápagos Islands.”

James K. Morrow

Source: The Philosopher's Apprentice (2008), Chapter 13 (p. 292)

Children , Health , Education , School

“Murray held his daughter at arm’s length. “Does God…er, visit you?”
“She doesn’t even whisper to me. I listen, but she doesn’t talk. It’s not fair.”
God didn’t talk. The best news he’d heard since Gabriel Frostig announced his embryo. “Look Julie, it’s good she doesn’t talk. God asks her children to do crazy things. It’s good she doesn’t whisper. Understand?”
“I guess.”
“Really?”
“Uh-huh. Where’d the crab go? Is he looking for his friends?””

James K. Morrow book Only Begotten Daughter

A profound weariness pressed upon Murray. “Yes. Right. His friends. It’s good God doesn’t whisper.”
Source: Only Begotten Daughter (1990), Chapter 2 (p. 46)

God , Children , Understanding , Daughters

“He smiled. Julie’s wedding, exquisite thought. Would his grandchildren be free of godhead? Was divinity a recessive trait?”

James K. Morrow book Only Begotten Daughter

Source: Only Begotten Daughter (1990), Chapter 5 (p. 92)

Smile , Wedding

““You want a motive, William? I’ve got a motive. Vengeance may not be a pretty word, but it’s what’s expected of us.”
“Right!” said Sverre. “We owe it to all those millions of dead people to make more millions of dead people. Be careful how you rewrite strategic doctrine, General, or you’ll come out of this war without a single medal.””

James K. Morrow

Source: This Is the Way the World Ends (1986), Chapter 7, “In Which Our Hero Makes a Strategic Decision and Acquires a Reason Not to Curse God and Die” (p. 80)

War , People , Motivation , Dead

“Myriad contradictory worlds,” lectured Professor Jerome Delacato, “forever splitting off from each other like branches on a tree, so that, somewhere out there, I am presently giving a lecture explaining how the many-worlds hypothesis cannot possibly be true.”

James K. Morrow book Only Begotten Daughter

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

World , Tree

“The world’s odd tolerance of fighting cropped up again and again in Francis’s study of history, particularly ancient history. On Earth, where his remotest forebears lived, a person could be indisputably responsible for the deaths of thousands and still go down in the history books as some sort of great hero. This was before Francis understood the biological inevitability of violence, so he was bewildered. Why, he wanted to know, were the names of Samson, Napoleon, Joan of Arc, Ulysses S. Grant, and Julius Caesar not obscenities, spoken after dark in whispers of revulsion and shame? The same teachers who couldn’t bring themselves to say shitbrain or ortwaddle openly discussed Alexander the Great.
He never found anyone who had the answer. Until he got to Planet Carlotta, he never even found anyone who had the question.”

James K. Morrow

Source: The Wine of Violence (1981), Chapter 2 (p. 19)

Death , Books , World , History

“The new homeland bulged with the sort of free-for-the-grabbing bounty that invites greed, envy, exploitation, profiteering, and politics.”

James K. Morrow

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

Envy

“The state flower of New Jersey is the common violet,” she explained, smirking, “the state bird is the eastern goldfinch, and the state fragrance is unrefined petroleum.”

James K. Morrow

Source: The Philosopher's Apprentice (2008), Chapter 14 (p. 319)

Flowers , Bird

“Francis realized he was afflicted with what his father used to term “an erection of the curiosity organ.””

James K. Morrow

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

Affliction

““I’ve always regretted not having a brother. Maybe I shouldn’t.”
“For me it’s always been like having pubic hair. You have it, but what the hell is it for?””

James K. Morrow

Source: The Wine of Violence (1981), Chapter 9 (p. 110)

Hell

“When a species fixates on the supernatural, it ceases to mature.”

James K. Morrow book Only Begotten Daughter

Source: Only Begotten Daughter (1990), Chapter 6 (p. 118)

“The labels fascinated Julie—Cutty Sark, Dewar’s, Beefeater—each logo dense with staid print and Anglo-Saxon dignity, as if alcohol were really a type of literary criticism and not a leading cause of traffic fatalities and brain rot.”

James K. Morrow book Only Begotten Daughter

Source: Only Begotten Daughter (1990), Chapter 4 (p. 77)

Alcohol

“The man was fat. His belly arrived like an advance guard, heralding the bulk to come, huge shoulders, a surplus chin. His white cassock had settled over his body like a tarpaulin dropped on a blimp.”

James K. Morrow book Only Begotten Daughter

Source: Only Begotten Daughter (1990), Chapter 12 (p. 214)

“Sweetie, if I’ve learned anything during my ten years at sea, it’s this. Never confuse your captain with God.”

James K. Morrow book Towing Jehovah

Source: Towing Jehovah (1994), Chapter 4, “Dirge” (p. 74)

God , Learning , Sea

“Francis’s office did not come with a videophone; at times he was surprised that his office came with a floor.”

James K. Morrow

Source: The Wine of Violence (1981), Chapter 2 (p. 25)

Time

““Are we innately aggressive?” asked Aquinas. “Was the nuclear predicament symptomatic of a more profound depravity? Nobody knows. But if this is so—and I suspect that it is—then the responsibility for what we are pleased to call our inhumanity still rests squarely in our blood-soaked hands. The killer-ape hypothesis does not specify a fate—it lays out an agenda. Beware, the fable warns. Caution. Trouble ahead. Genocidal weapons in the hands of creatures who are bored by peace.”
“I think I’m going to throw up,” said Brat.
“But the fable went unheeded. And the weapons, unchecked. And then, one cold Christmas season, death came to an admirable species—a species that wrote symphonies and sired Leonardo da Vinci and would have gone to the stars. It did not have to be this way. Three virtues only were needed—creative diplomacy, technical ingenuity, and moral outrage. But the greatest of these is moral outrage.””

James K. Morrow

Source: This Is the Way the World Ends (1986), Chapter 16, “In Which the Essential Question Is Answered and Something Very Much Like Justice Is Served” (p. 211)

Death , Fate , Peace , Way

“Better a citizen in hell than a slave in New Jersey.”

James K. Morrow book Only Begotten Daughter

Source: Only Begotten Daughter (1990), Chapter 9 (p. 162)

Hell

“Be sure to convict that chucklehead. He thinks a country’s Christianity is measured by the size of its thermonuclear arsenal.”

James K. Morrow

Source: This Is the Way the World Ends (1986), Chapter 13, “In Which the Prosecution’s Case Is Said to Be a Grin without a Cat” (p. 167)

Thinking , Country

“The undergraduates lamented the high price of textbooks and the equally outrageous fact that they were expected to read them.”

James K. Morrow

Source: The Philosopher's Apprentice (2008), Chapter 8 (p. 171)