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James K. Morrow
179 quotes
“There’s no objective evidence for an afterlife, and anecdotal reports of heaven cannot be distinguished from wishful thinking, self-delusion, and the effects of oxygen loss on the brain.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) first seen 1991 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: City of Truth (1991), as reprinted in Nebula Awards 28, p. 257
“Don’t bring your petty little human perspective to the matter, Dr. Onslo. To a vulture, carrion tastes like chocolate cake.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) first seen 2002 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The War of the Worldviews (2002), Originally published in Mars Probes, reprinted in Karen Haber & Robert Silverberg (ed.) Science Fiction: The Best of 2002, p. 271
“Bobby asked him what it was like to be insane. “There is nothing that being insane is like,” Rupert replied.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) first seen 2002 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The War of the Worldviews (2002), Originally published in Mars Probes, reprinted in Karen Haber & Robert Silverberg (ed.) Science Fiction: The Best of 2002, p. 272
“Oh, Robespierre, Robespierre, was the triumph of inadvertence over intention ever so total?”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) first seen 2002 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The War of the Worldviews (2002), Originally published in Mars Probes, reprinted in Karen Haber & Robert Silverberg (ed.) Science Fiction: The Best of 2002, p. 278
“Love Jesus, embrace your inner storm trooper, and leave the planet a more miserable place than you found it—that’s Christian nihilism in a nutshell,” said Whip Hemsoth. “If there’s a better path to fulfilling your purpose and engorging your wedding member, I haven’t found it.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) first seen 2016 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Only Ten More Shopping Days Until Ragnarök (2016), in Jonathan Strahan (ed.) Drowned Worlds (e-book edition, )
“Monotheism is just one of the myths by which we live, and Yahweh is just one of the deities who populate these stories.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My friends in the nouveau paganism camp accuse me of quaintness: Bible thumpers are straw men, so why bother?...My answer is that straw men, once set aflame with zeal, can be quite dangerous, and that the gap between New Age irrationalism and Christian fundamentalism is not nearly so wide as we might wish to believe.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When I destroyed my unwanted children, it was murder. When Yahweh did the same, it was eugenics. Do you approve of the universe, Ham?”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Being God, I must choose My words carefully. People, I’ve noticed, tend to hang on to My every remark. It gets annoying, this servile and sycophantic streak in Homo sapiens sapiens. There’s a difference, after all, between tasteful adulation and arrant toadyism, but they just don’t get it.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If You intervene too profusely in Earth’s affairs, I’ve noticed, the inhabitants become chronically distracted, and they forget to worship You.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’ve gone insane, Michael decided, retrieving a cowhide-bound appointments book from his valise. Only certifiable schizophrenics showed meetings with God on their calendars.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In fact, there’s probably only one thing worse than not being able to understand a person.” “What’s that?” asked Nimrod. “Being able to understand him completely.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Let us examine the language here. Evidently God is addressing this code to a patriarchy that will in turn disseminate it among the less powerful, namely wives and servants. And how long before these servants are downgraded further still...into slaves, even? Ten whole commandments, and not one word against slavery, not to mention bigotry, misogyny, or war.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As with all things political, the issue was power.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) first seen 1989 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Abe Lincoln in McDonald’s" p. 140 (originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, May 1989)
“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?”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“JOB. And now it’s time... FRANNY. To curse God... JOB. And live.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) first seen 1994 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Bible Stories for Adults, No. 46: The Soap Opera" p. 184 (originally published in Science Fiction Age, January 1994; ellipses in the original)
“My own preliminary diagnosis is that I am out of my skull and getting farther from its vicinity every day.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Let’s just hope that gravity isn’t as heavy as it used to be...”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Burne was tough. Burne practiced archeology, the most inconvenient of the sciences.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The new homeland bulged with the sort of free-for-the-grabbing bounty that invites greed, envy, exploitation, profiteering, and politics.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People found ever more ingenious ways to hate each other.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Smugness kills all utopias.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Children, being close to the ground, have a special rapport with insects.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Luli turned out to be uncompromising and brilliant. She could prosecute honey before a jury of bears and win.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In physical pursuits Luli was considerably less passionate. Her idea of a good time in bed was breakfast.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Francis’s office did not come with a videophone; at times he was surprised that his office came with a floor.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is far more arrogant to profess intuitive knowledge of the sacred than scientific knowledge of the tangible.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was not a question of regressive old ideas versus enlightened new ideas, but of reasonable caution versus arrogant caprice.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Francis had always been ecumenical in his atheism. He was as prepared to disbelieve in this Tolca character as he was to disbelieve in Yahweh, Jesus, Buddha, Vishnu, or any of the other words for what his father used to call “forcing yourself to misperceive the obvious.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“On your planet, how do you tell somebody that you love her?” “It’s very complicated. You say, ‘I love you,’ and then you stand back and see what happens.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Everyone here does think as I do,” replied Nefertiti Jones’s double, “and consequently I have no enemies.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In Francis’s view there was ultimate gold in this commitment to impractical knowledge, to theories that had no responsibilities other than to be true. On good days the new ideas inched human intellect toward the grand understandings that were science’s pride and joy.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Tez always had warm feelings about paradoxes. It was the scientist in her.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Francis realized he was afflicted with what his father used to term “an erection of the curiosity organ.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Someday that man will be astonished to discover there’s a whole world marching along outside his buzzing head.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nature may not be benign, but she is reliable.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Forgive me if I’m confusing you with logic.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Every religion says war is evil, but one way or another they end up playing along.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That was a very pretty speech,” said Loloc, “but if it contained an answer to even one of my questions then I did not hear it.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Zolmec,” said Nazra, “has always taught that the greatest words are ‘I could very well be wrong.’”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Often Burne found himself saying, “I don’t think you would make a very good soldier,” and with grating predictability he heard that he wouldn’t make a very good pacifist.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sneer, frown, and be miserable, for tomorrow you live.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A second slash ended the monster’s misery. So, he thought, this is how my Earthling ancestors ran their affairs. This is how lands were won, empires expanded, insurrections resisted, prisoners taken, slaves kept, heretics converted, captives made loquacious. For the first time in his life, Minnix felt himself a part of history. History, he decided, was a terrible idea.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As a race of scientists and thinkers,” she concluded, “we cannot claim with absolute certainty that Teot Yon’s personality is now beyond Heaven’s gates or inside Satan’s stewpot or about to enter the embryo of a bull. Some of us subscribe to the Afterworld Hypothesis, some to less cheerful views. We all know that as an empirical event Teot Yon’s existence is over, and it is time for his molecules to become air and ash and after that—where will his drifting pieces go and what new things will they help to form? Let the transformation begin!”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Father says don’t kill your principles just because the government is paying for the funeral.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Talo, it would appear that our sons are growing up.” She tut-tutted in mock solemnity. “And we always said, ‘It can’t happen here.’”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Naturally you expect the moral thing from me. But I’ve learned something, friend. Morals don’t count for a hell of a lot in this galaxy. I rank them somewhere between straight teeth and the ability to carry a tune.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source