James Morrow Quotes

Under the midnight sun, despair acquires the intensity of sex, insomnia the vehemence of art.

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.'

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

There’s nothing quite so pernicious as wishful thinking.

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

Life’s meaning doesn’t come from God! Life’s meaning comes from life!

I don't see you at Mass anymore."
"It's like fucking, Father. You gotta be up for it.

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.

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

Sweetie, if I’ve learned anything during my ten years at sea, it’s this. Never confuse your captain with God.

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

She had long ago accepted the fact that, when it came to the affectations with which radical feminists liked to impoverish their minds—crystal therapy, neo-paganism, Wicca—her skepticism placed her emphatically in a minority.

Another boyfriend?"
"A character in one of my plays. Runkleberg's my twentieth-century Abraham. One fine morning he's out watering his roses, and he hears God's voice telling him to sacrifice his son."
"Does he obey?"
"His wife intervenes."
"How?"
"She castrates him with his hedge clippers, and he bleeds to death.

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.

When Cassie Fowler awoke, she was less shocked to discover that an afterlife existed than to find that she, of all people, had been admitted to it. Her entire adulthood, it seemed, year after year of spiting the Almighty and saluting the Enlightenment, had come to nothing. She’d been saved, raptured, immortalized. Shit. The situation spoke badly of her and worse of eternity. What heaven worthy of the name would accept so ardent an unbeliever as she?