The man was fat. His belly arrived like an advance guard, heralding the bulk to come, huge shoulders, a surplus chin. His white cassock had settled o… - James Morrow

The world’s odd tolerance of fighting cropped up again and again in Francis’s study of history, particularly ancient history. On Earth, where his remotest forebears lived, a person could be indisputably responsible for the deaths of thousands and still go down in the history books as some sort of great hero. This was before Francis understood the biological inevitability of violence, so he was bewildered. Why, he wanted to know, were the names of Samson, Napoleon, Joan of Arc, Ulysses S. Grant, and Julius Caesar not obscenities, spoken after dark in whispers of revulsion and shame? The same teachers who couldn’t bring themselves to say shitbrain or ortwaddle openly discussed Alexander the Great.
He never found anyone who had the answer. Until he got to Planet Carlotta, he never even found anyone who had the question.

Be sure to convict that chucklehead. He thinks a country’s Christianity is measured by the size of its thermonuclear arsenal.

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.”