James Morrow Quotes

He said we'd learn the answers!"
"Life is full of disappointments."
"Here's a question you can answer." Beauchamp pointed to the INRI plaque. "That sign above your head—it's in all the crucifixion paintings. I've always wondered, what does it mean?"
"'I'm Not Returning Immediately.'

The man was fat. His belly arrived like an advance guard, heralding the bulk to come, huge shoulders, a surplus chin. His white cassock had settled over his body like a tarpaulin dropped on a blimp.

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.

Those who can kill themselves do, and those who can’t, teach philosophy.

Someday that man will be astonished to discover there’s a whole world marching along outside his buzzing head.

Sneer, frown, and be miserable, for tomorrow you live.

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.

Smugness kills all utopias.

What enormous potential for intermittent happiness the world offered.

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

In physical pursuits Luli was considerably less passionate. Her idea of a good time in bed was breakfast.

You aspired to be God's advocate, you got the job, you performed admirably. But God's advocate was ipso facto my advocate. Theodicy's a sucker's game, Professor. When Yahweh was operational, humanity's obligation wasn't to worship Him, for chrissakes. It was to celebrate His creativity and stand forevermore opposed to His malice. And anybody such as yourself, anybody who sought to shoehorn an omnibenevolent God into the same universe as Auschwitz...that person, Dr. Gregory Francis Lovett—that person did the Devil's work for him.

I stand before you today not as your hypothetical descendant but as the ambassador of my kind. The statistics, as you may know, are appalling: two of us sloughed off for every six who make it into the world. In all of history, there was never a more prolific abortionist than God Almighty. Make sure the tribunal learns that fact.

The wonders of nature, she learned, from wing of bee to sonar of bat to eyeball of baby, were not so much perfect machines as adequate contraptions. If nature bespoke a mind, it was a confused and inchoate one, a mind incapable of locating the optic nerve on the correct side of the retina, a mind unable to accomplish much of anything without resort to jerry-building and extinction.

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