Quotes from book
Only Begotten Daughter

James K. Morrow

Only Begotten Daughter is a 1990 fantasy novel written by James Morrow, setting the stage for his later Godhead Trilogy. The book shared the 1991 World Fantasy Award with Ellen Kushner's Thomas the Rhymer. It was also nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1990, and both the Locus and John W. Campbell Memorial Awards in 1991.

“The Sermon on the Mount—it never ends for you, does it? If somebody kicks your right buttock, turn the other cheek.”

James K. Morrow book Only Begotten Daughter

Source: Only Begotten Daughter (1990), Chapter 15 (p. 260)

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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)

“I can’t help suggesting that a God who communicates through leukemia is at best deranged.”

James K. Morrow book Only Begotten Daughter

Source: Only Begotten Daughter (1990), Chapter 6 (p. 116)

“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)

“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)

““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)

“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)

“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)

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