James K. Morrow: Likeness

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

James K. Morrow book Only Begotten Daughter

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

God , People , Question

“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.”

James K. Morrow

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

Hate , Change , Future

“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

“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

“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

“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.”

James K. Morrow book Towing Jehovah

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

“Like most visionaries, The Teller saw the distant future with optical-glass clarity, the intermediate future with beeswax clarity, and the immediate future with the clarity of dark glasses dipped in tar.”

James K. Morrow

Source: The Wine of Violence (1981), Chapter 13 (p. 153)

Distant , Future

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

James K. Morrow book Only Begotten Daughter

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

God

““What’s theodicy?” asked Anthony.
“Hard to explain.”
“Sounds like idiocy.”
“Much of it is.””

James K. Morrow book Towing Jehovah

Source: Towing Jehovah (1994), Chapter 2, “Priest” (p. 38)

“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

“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

““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

“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)

“Somehow his grandfather had wrought an honorable and glamorous life from the sea. But that era was gone. The system was dying. Advising a young man to join the United States Merchant Marine was like advising him to go into vaudeville.”

James K. Morrow book Towing Jehovah

Source: Towing Jehovah (1994), Chapter 2, “Priest” (p. 44)

Life , Sea

“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

“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