James K. Morrow Quotes (166 quotes, page 3)

“When I destroyed my unwanted children, it was murder. When Yahweh did the same, it was eugenics. Do you approve of the universe, Ham?”

James K. Morrow

"Bible Stories for Adults, No. 17: The Deluge" p. 11 (originally published in Full Spectrum, edited by Lou Aronica and Shawna McCarthy)
Short fiction, Bible Stories for Adults (1996)

Children , Universe

“It is far more arrogant to profess intuitive knowledge of the sacred than scientific knowledge of the tangible.”

James K. Morrow

Source: The Wine of Violence (1981), Chapter 4 (p. 44)

Knowledge

“If Western Europe and the United States committed seven billion dollars annually to the cause of clean drinking water worldwide, that investment would save four thousand lives a day”…
“Seven billion dollars. That’s less than what Europeans spend each year for perfume and Americans for cosmetic surgery. Before he went to the gallows, Enoch Anthem spoke often about Christ turning water into wine, but he never once implored Christendom to turn perfume into water.”

James K. Morrow

Source: The Philosopher's Apprentice (2008), Chapter 16 (p. 368)

Drink , Water , Wine , Christ

““What do you want out of life, Francis Lostwax?”
Francis smiled. “To never hurt anybody again.” His lack of hesitation surprised him. “To feel clean.””

James K. Morrow

Source: The Wine of Violence (1981), Chapter 27 (p. 314)

Life , Smile , Feeling , Hurt

“He was a devout believer in the second chance. To the man who asked, “What’s the point of closing the barn door after the horse has been stolen?” Murray would answer, “The point is that the door is now closed.””

James K. Morrow book Only Begotten Daughter

Source: Only Begotten Daughter (1990), Chapter 1 (p. 12)

Chance , Horse

“In physical pursuits Luli was considerably less passionate. Her idea of a good time in bed was breakfast.”

James K. Morrow

Source: The Wine of Violence (1981), Chapter 2 (p. 21)

Idea , Passion , Time

“My own preliminary diagnosis is that I am out of my skull and getting farther from its vicinity every day.”

James K. Morrow

"Diary of a Mad Deity" p. 191 (originally published in Synergy: New Science Fiction, Number 2, edited by George Zebrowski)
Short fiction, Bible Stories for Adults (1996)

“Neither Dexter nor I knew the first thing about running a small business. We were entrepreneurs the way Abbott and Costello were watercolorists. And so naturally it came to pass that Pieces of Mind was a hands-down, thumbs-up, flat-out success.”

James K. Morrow

Source: The Philosopher's Apprentice (2008), Chapter 8 (p. 170)

Way , Business , Nature , Success

“Those who can kill themselves do, and those who can’t, teach philosophy.”

James K. Morrow

Source: The Philosopher's Apprentice (2008), Chapter 13 (p. 295)

“Her audacity turned him on. There was nobody quite so arousing, he decided, as a worthy opponent.”

James K. Morrow book Towing Jehovah

Source: Towing Jehovah (1994), Chapter 11, “War” (p. 298)

“To George, Overwhite still seemed like a windbag, but he was obviously a resourceful and intelligent one, a windbag woven of the finest material.”

James K. Morrow

Source: This Is the Way the World Ends (1986), Chapter 14, “In Which the Nuclear Warriors have Their Day in Court” (p. 183)

Intelligence

“In Francis’s view there was ultimate gold in this commitment to impractical knowledge, to theories that had no responsibilities other than to be true. On good days the new ideas inched human intellect toward the grand understandings that were science’s pride and joy.”

James K. Morrow

Source: The Wine of Violence (1981), Chapter 11 (p. 130)

Idea , Understanding , Knowledge , Science

“I knew this guy one, a demac on the Amoco Cádiz, dying of bone cancer. You know what he said? ‘When they give you morphine like there’s no tomorrow, there isn’t.”

James K. Morrow book Towing Jehovah

Source: Towing Jehovah (1994), Chapter 12, “Father” (p. 321)

Guy

“The wonders of nature, she learned, from wing of bee to sonar of bat to eyeball of baby, were not so much perfect machines as adequate contraptions. If nature bespoke a mind, it was a confused and inchoate one, a mind incapable of locating the optic nerve on the correct side of the retina, a mind unable to accomplish much of anything without resort to jerry-building and extinction.”

James K. Morrow book Only Begotten Daughter

Source: Only Begotten Daughter (1990), Chapter 15 (p. 254)

Nature , Learning , Bee , Baby

““Pop, do we have heaven?” he’d asked on the day he discovered the (dead) cat. “You want to know a Jew’s idea of heaven?” his father had replied, looking up from his Maimonides. “It’s an endless succession of long winter nights on which we get paid a fair wage to sit in a warm room and read all the books ever written… Not just the famous ones, no, every book, the stuff nobody gets around to reading, forgotten plays, novels by people you never heard of. However, I profoundly doubt such a place exists.””

James K. Morrow book Only Begotten Daughter

Source: Only Begotten Daughter (1990), Chapter 1 (p. 13)

People , Books , Cats , Idea

“Burne was tough. Burne practiced archeology, the most inconvenient of the sciences.”

James K. Morrow

Source: The Wine of Violence (1981), Chapter 1 (p. 9)

Science

“Smugness kills all utopias.”

James K. Morrow

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

“A golden age, Londa calls it. She hopes it will return.”

James K. Morrow

“Golden ages rarely return,” I said “especially if they never existed.”
Source: The Philosopher's Apprentice (2008), Chapter 16 (p. 366)

Hope , Age

“Dexter Padula, a member of that ubiquitous academic breed, the professional graduate student, forever revising his dissertation while eyeing external reality with the anxious demeanor of a nursing infant struggling to imagine life beyond the tit.”

James K. Morrow

Source: The Philosopher's Apprentice (2008), Chapter 8 (p. 169)

Imagination , Life , Reality

“When Cassie Fowler awoke, she was less shocked to discover that an afterlife existed than to find that she, of all people, had been admitted to it. Her entire adulthood, it seemed, year after year of spiting the Almighty and saluting the Enlightenment, had come to nothing. She’d been saved, raptured, immortalized. Shit. The situation spoke badly of her and worse of eternity. What heaven worthy of the name would accept so ardent an unbeliever as she?”

James K. Morrow book Towing Jehovah

Source: Towing Jehovah (1994), Chapter 4, “Dirge” (p. 67)

Adulthood , People

“Don’t believe everything you hear about hell. Next time you run into some anti-hell propaganda, consider the source.”

James K. Morrow book Only Begotten Daughter

“You inflict eternal punishment on people,” Julie countered.
“Merely because it’s our job. And remember, we persecute only the guilty, which puts us one up on most other institutions.”
Source: Only Begotten Daughter (1990), Chapter 9 (p. 162)

Hell , Time

“There’s something else, Beverly. I’m a minister of the Lord. This will be unusual for me, a kind of experiment.”

James K. Morrow book Only Begotten Daughter

“I know all about it, Reverend. You folks do more experimenting than Princeton’s entire physics department.”
Source: Only Begotten Daughter (1990), Chapter 4 (p. 66)

“It must have been hard converting your elders in the Pentagon to this view.”

James K. Morrow

“Ever try stuffing a melted marshmallow up a wildcat’s ass? It can be done, but you have to like your job.”
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. 165)

“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.”

James K. Morrow

“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.”
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)

Motivation

“What do you want out of life, Francis Lostwax?”

James K. Morrow

Francis smiled. “To never hurt anybody again.” His lack of hesitation surprised him. “To feel clean.”
Source: The Wine of Violence (1981), Chapter 27 (p. 314)

Life

“Talo, it would appear that our sons are growing up.”

James K. Morrow

She tut-tutted in mock solemnity. “And we always said, ‘It can’t happen here.’”
Source: The Wine of Violence (1981), Chapter 25 (p. 296)

Appearance

“On your planet, how do you tell somebody that you love her?”

James K. Morrow

“It’s very complicated. You say, ‘I love you,’ and then you stand back and see what happens.”
Source: The Wine of Violence (1981), Chapter 9 (p. 112)

Love , Making love

“In fact, there’s probably only one thing worse than not being able to understand a person.”

James K. Morrow

“What’s that?” asked Nimrod.
“Being able to understand him completely.”
"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)

Personality , Understanding

“Much as I hate to admit it, humanity will get along perfectly well without me. Any species that could invent the twentieth century entirely on its own doesn’t need a Prince of Darkness.”

James K. Morrow

Source: Blameless in Abaddon (1996), Chapter 15 (p. 402; spoken by the Devil)

Hate

“Bitterness is not a philosophy, friend. Outrage is not an ethic. Stop counting corpses and reach a truce with the universe, or you’ll be stuck on the dung heap forever.”

James K. Morrow

Source: Blameless in Abaddon (1996), Chapter 15 (p. 392)

Universe

“You aspired to be God’s advocate, you got the job, you performed admirably. But God’s advocate was ipso facto my advocate. Theodicy’s a sucker’s game, Professor. When Yahweh was operational, humanity’s obligation wasn’t to worship Him, for chrissakes. It was to celebrate His creativity and stand forevermore opposed to His malice. And anybody such as yourself, anybody who sought to shoehorn an omnibenevolent God into the same universe as Auschwitz...that person, Dr. Gregory Francis Lovett—that person did the Devil’s work for him.”

James K. Morrow

Source: Blameless in Abaddon (1996), Chapter 15 (p. 391; spoken by the Devil)

Universe , Personality , Game , God

“I am what I am. I am Christ and Antichrist, God and Satan, Heaven and Hiroshima, Arcadia and Auschwitz.” Smiling devilishly, Sarkos lumbered up to Lovett. “Get it, fat boy? God is a duality. Dr. Jehovah and Mr. Hyde.” He lobbed the bottle cap into his mouth and chewed. “Allow me to tell you a bedtime story. It’s called ‘The Day the Gas Chambers Malfunctioned at Auschwitz.’ On second thought, why bother? You know the plot—the title gives it away—I’m surprised Braverman and Kelvin left it out of their overblown epic. Can you imagine how it feels to be a seven-year-old Jewish child, standing in line with hundreds of other Jewish children, waiting your turn to be thrown alive onto an open fire?”

James K. Morrow

Swallowing the bottle cap, Sarkos swerved toward Martin. “Don’t you see? It’s the only solution that can possibly work. No other theory comes close. Of course God has a dark side. Not just dark—evil. Radically, radically evil.”
Source: Blameless in Abaddon (1996), Chapter 15 (p. 390; spoken by the Devil, named Jonathan Sarkos in the book)

God , Imagination , Waiting , Smile

“Do you really think your terrestrial counterpart is living in the best of all possible worlds? Where I come from, an eighth grader would be ashamed to enter planet Earth in a junior high school science fair.”

James K. Morrow

Source: Blameless in Abaddon (1996), Chapter 15 (p. 387)

School , Science , Thinking , World

“To close the gap between jurisprudence and justice would require a canon of a hundred million laws.”

James K. Morrow

Source: Blameless in Abaddon (1996), Chapter 15 (p. 383)

Justice , Law

“How’re you feeling?”

James K. Morrow

“I highly recommend cancer. It’s worth it just for the drugs.”
Source: Blameless in Abaddon (1996), Chapter 14 (p. 361)

Feeling

“If nothing else, their adventure had proved that God was not about to put science out of business.”

James K. Morrow

Source: Blameless in Abaddon (1996), Chapter 11 (p. 259)

Business , Science , God

“Although covetousness is not my only flaw, it seems to cause me more pain than all my other sins combined.”

James K. Morrow

Source: Blameless in Abaddon (1996), Chapter 11 (p. 255; spoken by the Devil)

Pain

“Asia gave us dowry deaths and the caste system. Africa elevated famine to an art form. North America cultivated chattel slavery for far longer than I would have dared hope; South America has done things with political oppression that I am obliged to call brilliant; Australia showed the world that the only good aborigine is a dead aborigine; and Antarctica has fabulous weather. Of all the continents that constitute Earth’s terrain, however, Europe remains dearest to my heart and closest to my soul.
I allude here not to the sweatshops, the world wars, or totalitarian socialism (though none of these innovations has escaped my notice) but to the fact that the European imagination endowed me with a degree of glamour—you might even say charm—that in pre-coma times enabled me to function with extraordinary effectiveness. The concept of an Evil One is intrinsic to Islam, of course; the ancient Hebrews had their “adversary,” their satan; the Egyptians feared a dark deity called Set; Zoroastrians believed in Ahriman, essence of destruction (forever warring with Ohrmazd, source of all things bright and beautiful). But only in Christian Europe did the Prince of Hell acquire a personality as vivid and endearing as any you will meet in a Dickens novel.”

James K. Morrow

Source: Blameless in Abaddon (1996), Chapter 11 (p. 253; spoken by the Devil)

Soul , Hell , Imagination , Time

“I stand before you today not as your hypothetical descendant but as the ambassador of my kind. The statistics, as you may know, are appalling: two of us sloughed off for every six who make it into the world. In all of history, there was never a more prolific abortionist than God Almighty. Make sure the tribunal learns that fact.”

James K. Morrow

Source: Blameless in Abaddon (1996), Chapter 10 (p. 234)

God , History , Learning , World

“Don’t get testy with me, sir. I am Augustine of Hippo Regius, discoverer of concupiscence. Between my legs hangs the axis on which will turn the brave new world of Christian antieroticism.”

James K. Morrow

Source: Blameless in Abaddon (1996), Chapter 7 (p. 171)

World

“You should be talking to a doctor of theology, not a Father of Lies. The distinction is subtle but real.”

James K. Morrow

Source: Blameless in Abaddon (1996), Chapter 7 (p. 154; spoken by the Devil)

“For many citizens of the Western world, this situation proved, as you might imagine, troubling—especially in the United States, where reality has never enjoyed a great deal of prestige.”

James K. Morrow

Source: Blameless in Abaddon (1996), Chapter 6 (p. 129; spoken by the Devil)

World , Reality , Imagination

“I am the Father of Lies. Over the years, my children have done me proud. I shouldn’t play favorites, but I am especially pleased with “The meek shall inherit the earth.” Likewise, I shall always retain a soft spot in my heart for “Every cloud has a silver lining.””

James K. Morrow

As for “Time heals all wounds” and “Whenever God closes a door, He opens a window”—they, too, make me gloat unconscionably.
Source: Blameless in Abaddon (1996), Chapter 1 (p. 13; spoken by the Devil)

Children , Heart

“But just because our Creator subcontracts evil out to me, we mustn’t neglect to notice the blood on His hands.”

James K. Morrow

Source: Blameless in Abaddon (1996), Chapter 1 (p. 12; spoken by the Devil)

Evil

“Love does strange things to a man’s sense of proportion, which is why—contrary to rumor—it is by no means the Devil’s least favorite emotion.”

James K. Morrow

Source: Blameless in Abaddon (1996), Chapter 1 (p. 11)

Sense , Love , Making love