James Morrow cytaty (166 cytatów, strona 2)

“What really got under Londa’s skin, I soon learned, was not the Messiah’s sermon per se but the discontinuity between its sublime directives and the ignominious course of Western history, a spectacle that, the more we thought about it, increasingly struck Londa and me as largely a fancy-dress danse macabre, Titus Andronicus on a hemispheric and ultimately global scale, though I hastened to point out that the chronicles of other civilizations were likewise awash in blood. What had gone wrong? She wanted to know. When and why had the teachings of Jesus Christ become an optional component of Christianity?”

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James K. Morrow

Źródło: The Philosopher's Apprentice (2008), Chapter 6 (pp. 128-129)

““In the end Humankind destroyed the heaven and the earth,” Soapstone began…
“And Humankind said, ‘Let there be security,’ and there was security. And Humankind tested the security, that it would detonate. And Humankind divided the U-235 from the U-238. And the evening and the morning were the first strike.” Soapstone looked up from the book. “Some commentators feel that the author should have inserted, ‘And Humankind saw the security, that it was evil.’ Others point out that such a view was not universally shared.”…
Casting his eyes heavenward, Soapstone continued. “And Humankind said, ‘Let there be a holocaust in the midst of the dry land.’ And Humankind poisoned the aquifers that were below the dry land and scorched the ozone that was above the dry land. And the evening and the morning were the second strike.”…
“And Humankind said, ‘Let the ultraviolet light destroy the food chains that bring forth the moving creature!’ And the evening and the morning—”…
“And Humankind said, ‘Let there be rays in the firmament to fall upon the survivors!’ And Humankind made two great rays, the greater gamma radiation to give penetrating whole-body doses, and the lesser beta radiation to burn the plants and the bowels of animals! And Humankind sterilized each living creature, saying, ‘Be fruitless, and barren, and cease to—’””

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James K. Morrow

Źródło: This Is the Way the World Ends (1986), Chapter 9, “In Which by Taking a Step Backward the City of New York Brings Our Hero a Step Forward” (pp. 115-116; ellipses not in the original)

“Then there is the final possibility, my favorite.
—Yes?
—The final possibility is that I’m God.
—You’re God?
—Just a theory, but the data are provocative. I mean, look at me. Faceless, shapeless, holey, undifferentiated, Jewish, inscrutable…and a hermaphrodite to boot. Years ago, I told you sponges cannot be fatally dismembered, for each part quickly becomes the whole. To wit, I am both immortal and infinite.
—You’re God? You’re God herself? You?
—The data are provocative.
—God is a sponge? A sponge? There’s not much comfort in that.
—Agreed.
—Sponges can’t help us.
—Neither can God, as far as I can tell. I’d be happy to see some contrary data.”

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James K. Morrow książka Only Begotten Daughter

Źródło: Only Begotten Daughter (1990), Chapter 18 (p. 312)

“Nature may not be benign, but she is reliable.”

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James K. Morrow

Źródło: The Wine of Violence (1981), Chapter 13 (p. 157)

“Forgive me if I’m confusing you with logic.”

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James K. Morrow

Źródło: The Wine of Violence (1981), Chapter 13 (p. 157)

““A golden age, Londa calls it. She hopes it will return.”
“Golden ages rarely return,” I said “especially if they never existed.””

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James K. Morrow

Źródło: The Philosopher's Apprentice (2008), Chapter 16 (p. 366)

“I shall never cease to marvel at the clarity of stars when viewed from midocean, each as sharp and bright as the laser pointer God uses when lecturing the angels on evolution.”

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James K. Morrow

Źródło: The Philosopher's Apprentice (2008), Chapter 14 (p. 333)

“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.”

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James K. Morrow

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

“Every religion says war is evil, but one way or another they end up playing along.”

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James K. Morrow

Źródło: The Wine of Violence (1981), Chapter 14 (p. 164)

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

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James K. Morrow książka Only Begotten Daughter

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

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

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James K. Morrow

Preface
Short fiction, Bible Stories for Adults (1996)

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

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James K. Morrow książka Only Begotten Daughter

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

““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?””

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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)

“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.”

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James K. Morrow

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

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

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James K. Morrow

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

“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.”

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James K. Morrow

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

“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.”

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James K. Morrow

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

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

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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?”

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James K. Morrow książka Only Begotten Daughter

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

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

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James K. Morrow

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

“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.”

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James K. Morrow

Źródło: 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)