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James K. Morrow
179 quotes
“Dexter Padula, a member of that ubiquitous academic breed, the professional graduate student, forever revising his dissertation while eyeing external reality with the anxious demeanor of a nursing infant struggling to imagine life beyond the tit.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Neither Dexter nor I knew the first thing about running a small business. We were entrepreneurs the way Abbott and Costello were watercolorists. And so naturally it came to pass that Pieces of Mind was a hands-down, thumbs-up, flat-out success.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The undergraduates lamented the high price of textbooks and the equally outrageous fact that they were expected to read them.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Fair are the daughters of men, and fairest are those who read. Is there any creature more desirable than a damsel in intellectual distress?”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Is there anything quite so ludicrous as two intellectuals grappling in a philosophy-department parking lot? Each of us wanted to pummel the other to a pulp, but neither knew how to go about it.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It’s an old story, perhaps the oldest on earth,” Joan said. “The sky rumbles, the clouds congeal, the sun spasms. Is that a saint I see on high? An angel? The Lord God Jehovah himself? Now a holy voice booms down, instructing the poor prophet to grab a sword and thrust it into a fellow human, or perhaps a hundred fellow humans, or even a million if the cause is sufficiently sacred. The prophet never talks back. The tradition existed before me. It flourishes to this day. The sword, the blood, the freshly created corpses littering the battlefield, exuding the stink of epiphany.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Many are the consolations of literature, and not the least such solace occurs when an annoyingly virtuous hero succumbs to carnal temptation.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Recent biblical exegesis by Anthem’s newest organization, Hermeneutics Unlimited, had established beyond doubt that Jesus Christ was adamantly opposed to universal health-care insurance, class-action lawsuits, and corporate whistleblowers. Several prominent postrationalist theologians had successfully exposed public education for the misguided Marxist boondoggle it was, while a majority in Congress now advocated replacing the secular school system with private academies committed to sparing children the bad news that Charles Darwin had brought back from the Galápagos Islands.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Those who can kill themselves do, and those who can’t, teach philosophy.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Your disciples will expect something even grander from you. They’ll want you to become a deity.” She snickered and said, “I’m not ruling out that possibility.” “What sort of deity? A hamadryad? Plato’s demiurge? The Creator God of Judeo-Christian revelation?” “That job’s already taken,” she said. “But you could do it better,” I said. “When it comes to the physics, no, but in other areas—you’re right.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The state flower of New Jersey is the common violet,” she explained, smirking, “the state bird is the eastern goldfinch, and the state fragrance is unrefined petroleum.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A golden age, Londa calls it. She hopes it will return.” “Golden ages rarely return,” I said “especially if they never existed.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If Western Europe and the United States committed seven billion dollars annually to the cause of clean drinking water worldwide, that investment would save four thousand lives a day”... “Seven billion dollars. That’s less than what Europeans spend each year for perfume and Americans for cosmetic surgery. Before he went to the gallows, Enoch Anthem spoke often about Christ turning water into wine, but he never once implored Christendom to turn perfume into water.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What I love about fiction is the way this form of expression allows an author to wrestle an idea to the ground, as opposed to the bumper-sticker dialectics that pass for political and philosophical discourse in most sectors of our culture. In the age of mass communication, we need the quiet, contemplative and often ambiguous medium of the novel more than ever.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I wish more English teachers helped their students engage the classics at the level of raw delight, instead of putting them on the scent of symbols. A novel is not a cryptogram.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The world’s odd tolerance of fighting cropped up again and again in Francis’s study of history, particularly ancient history. On Earth, where his remotest forebears lived, a person could be indisputably responsible for the deaths of thousands and still go down in the history books as some sort of great hero. This was before Francis understood the biological inevitability of violence, so he was bewildered. Why, he wanted to know, were the names of Samson, Napoleon, Joan of Arc, Ulysses S. Grant, and Julius Caesar not obscenities, spoken after dark in whispers of revulsion and shame? The same teachers who couldn’t bring themselves to say shitbrain or ortwaddle openly discussed Alexander the Great. He never found anyone who had the answer. Until he got to Planet Carlotta, he never even found anyone who had the question.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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—’”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Are we innately aggressive?” asked Aquinas. “Was the nuclear predicament symptomatic of a more profound depravity? Nobody knows. But if this is so—and I suspect that it is—then the responsibility for what we are pleased to call our inhumanity still rests squarely in our blood-soaked hands. The killer-ape hypothesis does not specify a fate—it lays out an agenda. Beware, the fable warns. Caution. Trouble ahead. Genocidal weapons in the hands of creatures who are bored by peace.” “I think I’m going to throw up,” said Brat. “But the fable went unheeded. And the weapons, unchecked. And then, one cold Christmas season, death came to an admirable species—a species that wrote symphonies and sired Leonardo da Vinci and would have gone to the stars. It did not have to be this way. Three virtues only were needed—creative diplomacy, technical ingenuity, and moral outrage. But the greatest of these is moral outrage.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“—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.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That night Martin read the Book of Job for the first time in thirty years, discovering to his surprise it was a kind of courtroom drama, with the perverse twist that the Accused also functioned as Judge and Jury. Equally disturbing was the fact that when God went to make His case, He completely ignored Job’s main concern—justice—opting instead to intimidate him with the majesty of Creation: lions, whales, horses, hail, stars, and, ultimately, the unknowable monsters Behemoth and Leviathan. A rigged proceeding, yes, and yet Martin found it gripping. He was moved by both the force of Job’s bitterness and the caliber of his blasphemy.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When an upright citizen hears his neighbor has met with an earthquake or a hurricane, he doesn’t stop to ask, ‘Is there a hidden harmony here?’ He rolls up his sleeves and tries to help.” “Exactly.” With an athleticism that defied his years, Noah regained his feet and climbed onto the long, taut mooring line. “If I learned one thing from the Deluge, Your Grace, it is this: a man who seals up his ark for the sake of a greater good is a man who has ceded his soul to chaos.” Slowly, cautiously, he tightrope-walked toward the rudderless vessel. “The hidden harmony defense is pornography, Bishop Augustine—pornography for priests!”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Asia gave us dowry deaths and the caste system. Africa elevated famine to an art form. North America cultivated chattel slavery for far longer than I would have dared hope; South America has done things with political oppression that I am obliged to call brilliant; Australia showed the world that the only good aborigine is a dead aborigine; and Antarctica has fabulous weather. Of all the continents that constitute Earth’s terrain, however, Europe remains dearest to my heart and closest to my soul. I allude here not to the sweatshops, the world wars, or totalitarian socialism (though none of these innovations has escaped my notice) but to the fact that the European imagination endowed me with a degree of glamour—you might even say charm—that in pre-coma times enabled me to function with extraordinary effectiveness. The concept of an Evil One is intrinsic to Islam, of course; the ancient Hebrews had their “adversary,” their satan; the Egyptians feared a dark deity called Set; Zoroastrians believed in Ahriman, essence of destruction (forever warring with Ohrmazd, source of all things bright and beautiful). But only in Christian Europe did the Prince of Hell acquire a personality as vivid and endearing as any you will meet in a Dickens novel.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am what I am. I am Christ and Antichrist, God and Satan, Heaven and Hiroshima, Arcadia and Auschwitz.” Smiling devilishly, Sarkos lumbered up to Lovett. “Get it, fat boy? God is a duality. Dr. Jehovah and Mr. Hyde.” He lobbed the bottle cap into his mouth and chewed. “Allow me to tell you a bedtime story. It’s called ‘The Day the Gas Chambers Malfunctioned at Auschwitz.’ On second thought, why bother? You know the plot—the title gives it away—I’m surprised Braverman and Kelvin left it out of their overblown epic. Can you imagine how it feels to be a seven-year-old Jewish child, standing in line with hundreds of other Jewish children, waiting your turn to be thrown alive onto an open fire?” Swallowing the bottle cap, Sarkos swerved toward Martin. “Don’t you see? It’s the only solution that can possibly work. No other theory comes close. Of course God has a dark side. Not just dark—evil. Radically, radically evil.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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?”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Imagine that a team of neuroscientists has just unveiled a technology that lets a person remove all trace of some terrible experience from his brain. Under what conditions, if any, would you use it? What might it be like to go through life knowing you’d once suffered an ordeal so dreadful that it demanded radical excision? How long could you endure this strange affirmative ignorance, this lost access to the unspeakable, without becoming neurotic, or even slightly mad? In the long run, might you not decide that such circumscribed amnesia was worse than whatever memory you’d felt compelled to erase?”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The real reason Charles Darwin distresses people, I would argue, is not that he stumbled on an argument against theism. No, the problem was that he replaced theism—replaced it with a construct more beautiful and majestic than any account of the Supreme Being outside the Book of Job, a construct that invites us to see every variety of life, from aphids to archbishops, zygotes to zoologists, as vibrant threads in an epic tapestry, its warp and woof stretching across the eons and back to the Precambrian ooze, the seminal sea-vents, the primordial clay-pits, or wherever it all began. An astonishing construct, a mind-boggling construct, a construct of which Jehovah is understandably and insanely jealous.”
James K. Morrow (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source