James Morrow Quotes

I shall never cease to marvel at the clarity of stars when viewed from midocean, each as sharp and bright as the laser pointer God uses when lecturing the angels on evolution.

There's something else, Beverly. I'm a minister of the Lord. This will be unusual for me, a kind of experiment."
"I know all about it, Reverend. You folks do more experimenting than Princeton's entire physics department.

It was the most portentous mission since Saul of Tarsus has suffered an epileptic seizure and called it Christianity.

And what are you?"
"Me? I knew God was dead even before the corpse showed up.

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

Say “rationalist” to the average New Age chucklehead, and you conjured up unappetizing images: killjoys obsessed with rules, boors fixated on order, logic-mongers skating around on the surface of things, missing the cosmic essence. Phooey. A rationalist could experience awe as readily as a shaman. But it had to be quality awe, Oliver believed, awe without illusions—the sort of awe he’d felt upon intuiting the size of the universe, or sensing the unlikeliness of his birth.

My own preliminary diagnosis is that I am out of my skull and getting farther from its vicinity every day.

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

Murray held his daughter at arm’s length. “Does God...er, visit you?”
“She doesn’t even whisper to me. I listen, but she doesn’t talk. It’s not fair.” God didn’t talk. The best news he’d heard since Gabriel Frostig announced his embryo. “Look Julie, it’s good she doesn’t talk. God asks her children to do crazy things. It’s good she doesn’t whisper. Understand?”
“I guess.”
“Really?”
“Uh-huh. Where’d the crab go? Is he looking for his friends?” A profound weariness pressed upon Murray. “Yes. Right. His friends. It’s good God doesn’t whisper.”

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.

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

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.

Often Burne found himself saying, “I don’t think you would make a very good soldier,” and with grating predictability he heard that he wouldn’t make a very good pacifist.

The Sermon on the Mount—it never ends for you, does it? If somebody kicks your right buttock, turn the other cheek.

The real reason Charles Darwin distresses people, I would argue, is not that he stumbled on an argument against theism. No, the problem was that he replaced theism—replaced it with a construct more beautiful and majestic than any account of the Supreme Being outside the Book of Job, a construct that invites us to see every variety of life, from aphids to archbishops, zygotes to zoologists, as vibrant threads in an epic tapestry, its warp and woof stretching across the eons and back to the Precambrian ooze, the seminal sea-vents, the primordial clay-pits, or wherever it all began. An astonishing construct, a mind-boggling construct, a construct of which Jehovah is understandably and insanely jealous.