James Morrow Quotes

For moral reasons, the young Reverend Peter Sparrow declined to join the Saturday night gatherings of the Erebus Poker Club. Gambling, he knew, was Satan’s third favorite pastime, after sex and ecumenicalism.

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?

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

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

Oh, Robespierre, Robespierre, was the triumph of inadvertence over intention ever so total?

As usual, He underestimated the human potential for self-deception.

He smiled. Julie’s wedding, exquisite thought. Would his grandchildren be free of godhead? Was divinity a recessive trait?

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.

Hell was not perfect, but it was paradise compared with New Jersey.

Now we’re getting somewhere, George told himself, although he sensed that this situation would not endure.

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.

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.

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!

If You intervene too profusely in Earth’s affairs, I’ve noticed, the inhabitants become chronically distracted, and they forget to worship You.

Bitterness is not a philosophy, friend. Outrage is not an ethic. Stop counting corpses and reach a truce with the universe, or you’ll be stuck on the dung heap forever.