James Morrow Quotes

Fair are the daughters of men, and fairest are those who read. Is there any creature more desirable than a damsel in intellectual distress?

Somehow his grandfather had wrought an honorable and glamorous life from the sea. But that era was gone. The system was dying. Advising a young man to join the United States Merchant Marine was like advising him to go into vaudeville.

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.

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.

The problem is, only a few people get to be scientists. You see the dilemma? Given the choice between a truth they can appreciate and a lie they can live, most people will take you-know-what.

Luli turned out to be uncompromising and brilliant. She could prosecute honey before a jury of bears and win.

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.

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 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!

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.

Asia gave us dowry deaths and the caste system. Africa elevated famine to an art form. North America cultivated chattel slavery for far longer than I would have dared hope; South America has done things with political oppression that I am obliged to call brilliant; Australia showed the world that the only good aborigine is a dead aborigine; and Antarctica has fabulous weather. Of all the continents that constitute Earth’s terrain, however, Europe remains dearest to my heart and closest to my soul.
I allude here not to the sweatshops, the world wars, or totalitarian socialism (though none of these innovations has escaped my notice) but to the fact that the European imagination endowed me with a degree of glamour—you might even say charm—that in pre-coma times enabled me to function with extraordinary effectiveness. The concept of an Evil One is intrinsic to Islam, of course; the ancient Hebrews had their “adversary,” their satan; the Egyptians feared a dark deity called Set; Zoroastrians believed in Ahriman, essence of destruction (forever warring with Ohrmazd, source of all things bright and beautiful). But only in Christian Europe did the Prince of Hell acquire a personality as vivid and endearing as any you will meet in a Dickens novel.

My spirits rose: I could see the photon at the end of the tunnel.

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.

Recent biblical exegesis by Anthem’s newest organization, Hermeneutics Unlimited, had established beyond doubt that Jesus Christ was adamantly opposed to universal health-care insurance, class-action lawsuits, and corporate whistleblowers. Several prominent postrationalist theologians had successfully exposed public education for the misguided Marxist boondoggle it was, while a majority in Congress now advocated replacing the secular school system with private academies committed to sparing children the bad news that Charles Darwin had brought back from the Galápagos Islands.

With a rush of joy, I realized that this Darwinist stance would appeal neither to secular Marxists, for whom moral lessons lay exclusively within history’s brute curriculum, nor to evangelical Christians, for whom a naturalist ethics was a contradiction in terms, nor to middle-class mystics, who detested any argument smacking of biological determinism. A philosophical position that could simultaneously antagonize the collectivist left, the God-besotted right, and the Aquarian fringe must, I decided, have a lot going for it.