“Where is the miracle in Jesus being dead in the tomb instead of being alive just as the people expected Jonah to be dead inside a fish?”

Source: The Blind Watchmaker (1986), Chapter 1 “Explaining the Very Improbable”

On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Matters (1923)
Context: It is an error to divide people into the living and the dead: there are people who are dead-alive, and people who are alive-alive. The dead-alive also write, walk, speak, act. But they make no mistakes; only machines make no mistakes, and they produce only dead things. The alive-alive are constantly in error, in search, in questions, in torment.
The same is true of what we write: it walks and it talks, but it can be dead-alive or alive-alive. What is truly alive stops before nothing and ceaselessly seeks answers to absurd, "childish" questions. Let the answers be wrong, let the philosophy be mistaken — errors are more valuable than truths: truth is of the machine, error is alive; truth reassures, error disturbs. And if answers be impossible of attainment, all the better! Dealing with answered questions is the privilege of brains constructed like a cow's stomach, which, as we know, is built to digest cud.

As quoted in Playboy (February 1985)
1980s

Invisible Monsters

Scopes Trial (1925), Day 7

Death: Live It! p. 80.
Death: Live It! (2005)

Clerihews: Biography for Beginners (1905)

Source: Infinite Jest (1996)