James Morrow Quotes

I said my standard grace—“Dear Lord, we know You have good reasons for allowing thousands of children to starve in various undeveloped nations, and we thank You for concomitantly supplying our own table with these grossly superfluous portions, amen”—after which we all dug in.

Every religion says war is evil, but one way or another they end up playing along.

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.

When a species fixates on the supernatural, it ceases to mature.

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.

If nothing else, their adventure had proved that God was not about to put science out of business.

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

Francis’s office did not come with a videophone; at times he was surprised that his office came with a floor.

Another boyfriend?"
"A character in one of my plays. Runkleberg's my twentieth-century Abraham. One fine morning he's out watering his roses, and he hears God's voice telling him to sacrifice his son."
"Does he obey?"
"His wife intervenes."
"How?"
"She castrates him with his hedge clippers, and he bleeds to death.

Her libido blazed to life. She smiled, impressed by the party-crashing shamelessness of sex, its willingness to show up anywhere—a funeral, a sermon, a final farewell. This was the way to go out, all right, thumbing your labia at the cosmos.

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.'

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.

I cannot respect any theory of evil that so neatly immunizes itself against empirical disconfirmation," said Gordon. "All theodicies requiring belief in an afterlife are manifestly begging the question.

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

Everyone here does think as I do," replied Nefertiti Jones's double, "and consequently I have no enemies.