James Morrow Quotes

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.

The fission bomb was a costly mistress. Consider, your Honors. In 1979 this planet celebrated the International Year of the Child. Of the one hundred and twenty-two million children born that year, one of every ten was dead by 1982, and most died for lack of inexpensive food and vaccines. Yet in 1982 the world spent one trillion dollars on weapons. One trillion dollars!

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.

I've been good, I've been bad—nothing gets her attention. What am I supposed to do, sacrifice a goat?"
"Perhaps you should start a religion. You know—reveal your mother to the world."
"How can I reveal her when I don't know what she's like?"
"Use your imagination. Everybody else does.

Her audacity turned him on. There was nobody quite so arousing, he decided, as a worthy opponent.

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

I knew this guy one, a demac on the Amoco Cádiz, dying of bone cancer. You know what he said? 'When they give you morphine like there's no tomorrow, there isn't.'

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

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.

In my protracted sojourn on this planet, Mr. Candle, I have come to value three commodities above all others: good books, decent claret, and worthy opponents.

Better a citizen in hell than a slave in New Jersey.

In fact, there's probably only one thing worse than not being able to understand a person."
"What's that?" asked Nimrod.
"Being able to understand him completely.

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

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.

What's theodicy?" asked Anthony.
"Hard to explain."
"Sounds like idiocy."
"Much of it is.