James Morrow Quotes

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

Bobby asked him what it was like to be insane. “There is nothing that being insane is like,” Rupert replied.

Burne was tough. Burne practiced archeology, the most inconvenient of the sciences.

Actually, the answer's quite simple." Two red eyes floated in the mist.
"Really? Tell me. Why does God allow evil?" The red eyes vanished, leaving only the lantern and the night. "Because power corrupts," said Wyvern's disembodied voice. "And absolute power corrupts absolutely.

My own preliminary diagnosis is that I am out of my skull and getting farther from its vicinity every day.

It must have been hard converting your elders in the Pentagon to this view."
"Ever try stuffing a melted marshmallow up a wildcat's ass? It can be done, but you have to like your job.

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.

As with the rest of Phoebe’s species, Julie must not let her become dependent upon supernatural solutions, trading one addiction for another.

Origen cut off his own balls," Martin informed Randall.
"Prostate cancer?"
"Faith.

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—'

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.

Which alternative is worse, I wonder?" she said. "To deny death and thus risk never being wholly alive, or to face oblivion squarely and risk paralysis by dread?"
"Nobody knows," I said. "It's ambiguous."
"If I ever get to be God," she said, unleashing the grin of the person who'd invented Largesse, "my first act will be to make ambiguity illegal.

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?

Although covetousness is not my only flaw, it seems to cause me more pain than all my other sins combined.

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.