James Morrow Quotes

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!

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.

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.

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

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

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

That maxim, it’s not an argument against atheism—it’s an argument against foxholes.

It was not a question of regressive old ideas versus enlightened new ideas, but of reasonable caution versus arrogant caprice.

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.

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.'

Is there anything quite so ludicrous as two intellectuals grappling in a philosophy-department parking lot? Each of us wanted to pummel the other to a pulp, but neither knew how to go about it.

JOB. And now it’s time...
FRANNY. To curse God...
JOB. And live.

Smugness kills all utopias.

Many are the consolations of literature, and not the least such solace occurs when an annoyingly virtuous hero succumbs to carnal temptation.

Love does strange things to a man’s sense of proportion, which is why—contrary to rumor—it is by no means the Devil’s least favorite emotion.