Quotes from book
Towing Jehovah

James K. Morrow

Towing Jehovah is a 1994 fantasy novel by American writer James K. Morrow, published by Harcourt Brace. The book is about the death of God and the subsequent towing of his body across the Atlantic Ocean. In 1995 it received the World Fantasy Award for best novel, with two additional best novel awards. It was followed by two sequels in 1996 and 1999.

“It was the most portentous mission since Saul of Tarsus has suffered an epileptic seizure and called it Christianity.”

James K. Morrow book Towing Jehovah

Source: Towing Jehovah (1994), Chapter 4, “Dirge” (p. 73)

““It’s tragic,” he said.
“God killed them with His hurricane,” she said.
“God had nothing to do with it.”
“Actually I agree with you, though for reasons quite different from yours.””

James K. Morrow book Towing Jehovah

Source: Towing Jehovah (1994), Chapter 4, “Dirge” (p. 69)

“To Thomas’s eye, Union Square combined the exoticism of The Arabian Nights with the bedrock banality of American commerce, as if a medieval Persian bazaar had been transplanted to the twentieth century and taken over by Wal-Mart.”

James K. Morrow book Towing Jehovah

Source: Towing Jehovah (1994), Chapter 2, “Priest” (p. 29)

““Another boyfriend?”
“A character in one of my plays. Runkleberg’s my twentieth-century Abraham. One fine morning he’s out watering his roses, and he hears God’s voice telling him to sacrifice his son.”
“Does he obey?”
“His wife intervenes.”
“How?”
“She castrates him with his hedge clippers, and he bleeds to death.””

James K. Morrow book Towing Jehovah

Source: Towing Jehovah (1994), Chapter 4, “Dirge” (p. 71)

“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)

“A corpse was far too easy a thing to rationalize. Christianity had been doing it for two thousand years.”

James K. Morrow book Towing Jehovah

Source: Towing Jehovah (1994), Chapter 4, “Dirge” (p. 91)

“That maxim, it’s not an argument against atheism—it’s an argument against foxholes.”

James K. Morrow book Towing Jehovah

Source: Towing Jehovah (1994), Chapter 8, “Famine” (p. 213)

“Under the midnight sun, despair acquires the intensity of sex, insomnia the vehemence of art.”

James K. Morrow book Towing Jehovah

Source: Towing Jehovah (1994), Chapter 12, “Father” (p. 337)

““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)

“Say “rationalist” to the average New Age chucklehead, and you conjured up unappetizing images: killjoys obsessed with rules, boors fixated on order, logic-mongers skating around on the surface of things, missing the cosmic essence. Phooey. A rationalist could experience awe as readily as a shaman. But it had to be quality awe, Oliver believed, awe without illusions—the sort of awe he’d felt upon intuiting the size of the universe, or sensing the unlikeliness of his birth.”

James K. Morrow book Towing Jehovah

Source: Towing Jehovah (1994), Chapter 5, “Teeth” (p. 109)

“There’s nothing quite so pernicious as wishful thinking.”

James K. Morrow book Towing Jehovah

Source: Towing Jehovah (1994), Chapter 11, “War” (p. 285)

“Life’s meaning doesn’t come from God! Life’s meaning comes from life!”

James K. Morrow book Towing Jehovah

Source: Towing Jehovah (1994), Chapter 7, “Island” (p. 178)

“Sweetie, if I’ve learned anything during my ten years at sea, it’s this. Never confuse your captain with God.”

James K. Morrow book Towing Jehovah

Source: Towing Jehovah (1994), Chapter 4, “Dirge” (p. 74)

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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)

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