James Morrow Quotes

That was a very pretty speech," said Loloc, "but if it contained an answer to even one of my questions then I did not hear it.

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

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.

Forgive me if I’m confusing you with logic.

Nature may not be benign, but she is reliable.

Like most visionaries, The Teller saw the distant future with optical-glass clarity, the intermediate future with beeswax clarity, and the immediate future with the clarity of dark glasses dipped in tar.

Someday that man will be astonished to discover there’s a whole world marching along outside his buzzing head.

Francis realized he was afflicted with what his father used to term “an erection of the curiosity organ.”

Tez always had warm feelings about paradoxes. It was the scientist in her.

In Francis’s view there was ultimate gold in this commitment to impractical knowledge, to theories that had no responsibilities other than to be true. On good days the new ideas inched human intellect toward the grand understandings that were science’s pride and joy.

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

On your planet, how do you tell somebody that you love her?"
"It's very complicated. You say, 'I love you,' and then you stand back and see what happens.

I've always regretted not having a brother. Maybe I shouldn't."
"For me it's always been like having pubic hair. You have it, but what the hell is it for?

Francis had always been ecumenical in his atheism. He was as prepared to disbelieve in this Tolca character as he was to disbelieve in Yahweh, Jesus, Buddha, Vishnu, or any of the other words for what his father used to call “forcing yourself to misperceive the obvious.”

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.