James K. Morrow

There’s no objective evidence for an afterlife, and anecdotal reports of heaven cannot be distinguished from wishful thinking, self-delusion, and the effects of oxygen loss on the brain.

— James K. Morrow

Monotheism is just one of the myths by which we live, and Yahweh is just one of the deities who populate these stories.

— James K. Morrow

My friends in the nouveau paganism camp accuse me of quaintness: Bible thumpers are straw men, so why bother?...My answer is that straw men, once set aflame with zeal, can be quite dangerous, and that the gap between New Age irrationalism and Christian fundamentalism is not nearly so wide as we might wish to believe.

— James K. Morrow

When I destroyed my unwanted children, it was murder. When Yahweh did the same, it was eugenics. Do you approve of the universe, Ham?

— James K. Morrow

Being God, I must choose My words carefully. People, I’ve noticed, tend to hang on to My every remark. It gets annoying, this servile and sycophantic streak in Homo sapiens sapiens. There’s a difference, after all, between tasteful adulation and arrant toadyism, but they just don’t get it.

— James K. Morrow

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

— James K. Morrow

I’ve gone insane, Michael decided, retrieving a cowhide-bound appointments book from his valise. Only certifiable schizophrenics showed meetings with God on their calendars.

— James K. Morrow

“In fact, there’s probably only one thing worse than not being able to understand a person.”“Being able to understand him completely.”

— James K. Morrow

Let us examine the language here. Evidently God is addressing this code to a patriarchy that will in turn disseminate it among the less powerful, namely wives and servants. And how long before these servants are downgraded further still...into slaves, even? Ten whole commandments, and not one word against slavery, not to mention bigotry, misogyny, or war.

— James K. Morrow

As with all things political, the issue was power.

— James K. Morrow

“You see, Ebenezer, charity begs a crucial question. How did the bestower attain the position from which he now exercises his largesse?” My dead colleague cleaned his teeth with one of his many appended keys. “Through imagination and merit? Or through inherited privilege and ruthless exploitation?”

— James K. Morrow

JOB. And now it’s time...JOB. And live.

— James K. Morrow

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

— James K. Morrow

Let’s just hope that gravity isn’t as heavy as it used to be...

— James K. Morrow

Burne was tough. Burne practiced archeology, the most inconvenient of the sciences.

— James K. Morrow

The new homeland bulged with the sort of free-for-the-grabbing bounty that invites greed, envy, exploitation, profiteering, and politics.

— James K. Morrow

People found ever more ingenious ways to hate each other.

— James K. Morrow

Children, being close to the ground, have a special rapport with insects.

— James K. Morrow

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

— James K. Morrow

In physical pursuits Luli was considerably less passionate. Her idea of a good time in bed was breakfast.

— James K. Morrow

Francis’s office did not come with a videophone; at times he was surprised that his office came with a floor.

— James K. Morrow

It is far more arrogant to profess intuitive knowledge of the sacred than scientific knowledge of the tangible.

— James K. Morrow

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

— James K. Morrow

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.”

— James K. Morrow

“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?”

— James K. Morrow

“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.”

— James K. Morrow

“Everyone here does think as I do,” replied Nefertiti Jones’s double, “and consequently I have no enemies.”

— James K. Morrow

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.

— James K. Morrow

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

— James K. Morrow

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

— James K. Morrow

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

— James K. Morrow

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.

— James K. Morrow

Nature may not be benign, but she is reliable.

— James K. Morrow

Forgive me if I’m confusing you with logic.

— James K. Morrow

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.

— James K. Morrow

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

— James K. Morrow

“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.”

— James K. Morrow

“Zolmec,” said Nazra, “has always taught that the greatest words are ‘I could very well be wrong.’”

— James K. Morrow

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.

— James K. Morrow

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

— James K. Morrow

A second slash ended the monster’s misery. So, he thought, this is how my Earthling ancestors ran their affairs. This is how lands were won, empires expanded, insurrections resisted, prisoners taken, slaves kept, heretics converted, captives made loquacious. For the first time in his life, Minnix felt himself a part of history.History, he decided, was a terrible idea.

— James K. Morrow

Father says don’t kill your principles just because the government is paying for the funeral.

— James K. Morrow

“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.’”

— James K. Morrow

Naturally you expect the moral thing from me. But I’ve learned something, friend. Morals don’t count for a hell of a lot in this galaxy. I rank them somewhere between straight teeth and the ability to carry a tune.

— James K. Morrow

“What do you want out of life, Francis Lostwax?”Francis smiled. “To never hurt anybody again.” His lack of hesitation surprised him. “To feel clean.”

— James K. Morrow

Gravestones, he knew, were educational media, teaching that life has limits: don’t set your sights too high.

— James K. Morrow

Now we’re getting somewhere, George told himself, although he sensed that this situation would not endure.

— James K. Morrow

Maybe I’ll end up on the fun side of her pants some day.

— James K. Morrow

“You want a motive, William? I’ve got a motive. Vengeance may not be a pretty word, but it’s what’s expected of us.”“Right!” said Sverre. “We owe it to all those millions of dead people to make more millions of dead people. Be careful how you rewrite strategic doctrine, General, or you’ll come out of this war without a single medal.”

— James K. Morrow

For moral reasons, the young Reverend Peter Sparrow declined to join the Saturday night gatherings of the Erebus Poker Club. Gambling, he knew, was Satan’s third favorite pastime, after sex and ecumenicalism.

— James K. Morrow

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!

— James K. Morrow

“It must have been hard converting your elders in the Pentagon to this view.”“Ever try stuffing a melted marshmallow up a wildcat’s ass? It can be done, but you have to like your job.”

— James K. Morrow

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

— James K. Morrow

To George, Overwhite still seemed like a windbag, but he was obviously a resourceful and intelligent one, a windbag woven of the finest material.

— James K. Morrow

He was a devout believer in the second chance. To the man who asked, “What’s the point of closing the barn door after the horse has been stolen?” Murray would answer, “The point is that the door is now closed.”

— James K. Morrow

What enormous potential for intermittent happiness the world offered.

— James K. Morrow

What good is it having God for a mother if she never sends you a birthday card?

— James K. Morrow

“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.”

— James K. Morrow

People are always asking, does God exist? Of course she does. The real question: what is she like?

— James K. Morrow

“Right before bed, I spend twenty minutes in this place. Then I can sleep.”“Uh-huh. Just like God.”

— James K. Morrow

The labels fascinated Julie—Cutty Sark, Dewar’s, Beefeater—each logo dense with staid print and Anglo-Saxon dignity, as if alcohol were really a type of literary criticism and not a leading cause of traffic fatalities and brain rot.

— James K. Morrow

“I’ve been good, I’ve been bad—nothing gets her attention. What am I supposed to do, sacrifice a goat?”“Use your imagination. Everybody else does.”

— James K. Morrow

You wouldn’t like him. Major fanatic. Confuses migraine headaches with God.

— James K. Morrow

“Actually, the answer’s quite simple.” Two red eyes floated in the mist. The red eyes vanished, leaving only the lantern and the night. “Because power corrupts,” said Wyvern’s disembodied voice. “And absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

— James K. Morrow

“I’m really interested in this stuff.” Julie rubbed a carton labeled ELEMENTARY PARTICLES. Howard said, “Good for you. These days most people prefer to impoverish their minds with mysticism.”

— James K. Morrow

“Myriad contradictory worlds,” lectured Professor Jerome Delacato, “forever splitting off from each other like branches on a tree, so that, somewhere out there, I am presently giving a lecture explaining how the many-worlds hypothesis cannot possibly be true.”

— James K. Morrow

What most people don’t realize is that something unprecedented has entered the world. Bang—science—and suddenly a proposition is true because it’s true, Julie, not because its adherents have the biggest churches or the grandest inquisitors or the most weeks on The New York Times bestseller list.

— James K. Morrow

She asked, “Do you believe science has all the answers?”“Science does have all the answers,” said Howard, withdrawing. “The problem is that we don’t have all the science.”

— James K. Morrow

He smiled. Julie’s wedding, exquisite thought. Would his grandchildren be free of godhead? Was divinity a recessive trait?

— James K. Morrow

I think you’re so full of shit you’ve got roses growing out of your ass.

— James K. Morrow

I can’t help suggesting that a God who communicates through leukemia is at best deranged.

— James K. Morrow

When a species fixates on the supernatural, it ceases to mature.

— James K. Morrow

As with the rest of Phoebe’s species, Julie must not let her become dependent upon supernatural solutions, trading one addiction for another.

— James K. Morrow

The problem is, only a few people get to be scientists. You see the dilemma? Given the choice between a truth they can appreciate and a lie they can live, most people will take you-know-what.

— James K. Morrow

Although Bix Constantine disbelieved in hell as intensely as he did in heaven, he knew what the place would be like. Hell, for Bix, was jealousy. It was failed journalists seeing their enemies receive Pulitzer Prizes. It was compulsive gamblers seeing jackpots gush from adjacent players’ slot machines and sex-starved young men seeing their friends piled high with naked cheerleaders.

— James K. Morrow

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

— James K. Morrow

“Don’t believe everything you hear about hell. Next time you run into some anti-hell propaganda, consider the source.”“Merely because it’s our job. And remember, we persecute only the guilty, which puts us one up on most other institutions.”

— James K. Morrow

Hell was not perfect, but it was paradise compared with New Jersey.

— James K. Morrow

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 over his body like a tarpaulin dropped on a blimp.

— James K. Morrow

“The universe,” says Wyvern, “is a Ph. D. thesis that God was unable to successfully defend.”

— James K. Morrow

The wonders of nature, she learned, from wing of bee to sonar of bat to eyeball of baby, were not so much perfect machines as adequate contraptions. If nature bespoke a mind, it was a confused and inchoate one, a mind incapable of locating the optic nerve on the correct side of the retina, a mind unable to accomplish much of anything without resort to jerry-building and extinction.

— James K. Morrow

“You’re not very religious, are you?” said Irene.“I’m more into gravity.”

— James K. Morrow

Babies are like kittens, Julie, they grow into something much more sinister.

— James K. Morrow

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

— James K. Morrow

“You see God as an engineer?” asked Urpastor Phelps.“Incompetent, perfect, who knows? God is whatever we agree to pretend God is. God is our image of God.”

— James K. Morrow

Her libido blazed to life. She smiled, impressed by the party-crashing shamelessness of sex, its willingness to show up anywhere—a funeral, a sermon, a final farewell. This was the way to go out, all right, thumbing your labia at the cosmos.

— James K. Morrow

There are none so blind as those who see angels...None so deaf as those who hear gods.

— James K. Morrow

To Thomas’s eye, Union Square combined the exoticism of The Arabian Nights with the bedrock banality of American commerce, as if a medieval Persian bazaar had been transplanted to the twentieth century and taken over by Wal-Mart.

— James K. Morrow

“What’s theodicy?” asked Anthony.“Much of it is.”

— James K. Morrow

Somehow his grandfather had wrought an honorable and glamorous life from the sea. But that era was gone. The system was dying. Advising a young man to join the United States Merchant Marine was like advising him to go into vaudeville.

— James K. Morrow

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?

— James K. Morrow

“It’s tragic,” he said.“Actually I agree with you, though for reasons quite different from yours.”

— James K. Morrow

“Another boyfriend?”“She castrates him with his hedge clippers, and he bleeds to death.”

— James K. Morrow

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.

— James K. Morrow

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

— James K. Morrow

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

— James K. Morrow

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

— James K. Morrow

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.

— James K. Morrow

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

— James K. Morrow

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

— James K. Morrow

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

— James K. Morrow

There’s nothing quite so pernicious as wishful thinking.

— James K. Morrow

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

— James K. Morrow

“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.’”

— James K. Morrow

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

— James K. Morrow

On three occasions, Martin had wed a man to a man; twice, a woman to a woman. Although these same-sex unions scandalized many of his fellow Republicans, he performed them with equanimity, believing that the principle of laissez-faire should apply no less to the bedroom than to the marketplace.

— James K. Morrow

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.

— James K. Morrow

But just because our Creator subcontracts evil out to me, we mustn’t neglect to notice the blood on His hands.

— James K. Morrow

I am the Father of Lies. Over the years, my children have done me proud. I shouldn’t play favorites, but I am especially pleased with “The meek shall inherit the earth.” Likewise, I shall always retain a soft spot in my heart for “Every cloud has a silver lining.” As for “Time heals all wounds” and “Whenever God closes a door, He opens a window”—they, too, make me gloat unconscionably.

— James K. Morrow

As usual, He underestimated the human potential for self-deception.

— James K. Morrow

Never underestimate the value of a falsehood, friends. Never doubt the power of a lie. Blessed are the mendacious, for they shall grow wealthy beyond their wildest dreams.

— James K. Morrow

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

— James K. Morrow

“God is out of the loop,” said Martin...“He’s left the scene”—he grimaced, realizing what he was about to say—“of His crimes.”

— James K. Morrow

In my protracted sojourn on this planet, Mr. Candle, I have come to value three commodities above all others: good books, decent claret, and worthy opponents.

— James K. Morrow

For many citizens of the Western world, this situation proved, as you might imagine, troubling—especially in the United States, where reality has never enjoyed a great deal of prestige.

— James K. Morrow

I said my standard grace—“Dear Lord, we know You have good reasons for allowing thousands of children to starve in various undeveloped nations, and we thank You for concomitantly supplying our own table with these grossly superfluous portions, amen”—after which we all dug in.

— James K. Morrow

You should be talking to a doctor of theology, not a Father of Lies. The distinction is subtle but real.

— James K. Morrow

Don’t get testy with me, sir. I am Augustine of Hippo Regius, discoverer of concupiscence. Between my legs hangs the axis on which will turn the brave new world of Christian antieroticism.

— James K. Morrow

“I cannot respect any theory of evil that so neatly immunizes itself against empirical disconfirmation,” said Gordon. “All theodicies requiring belief in an afterlife are manifestly begging the question.”

— James K. Morrow

“It doesn’t derive from any sort of biology,” snapped Augustine. “It derives from sound reasoning and the Book of Genesis. ‘In Adam’s Fall, we sinned all.’”“Through Adam’s shlong, our race went wrong,” replied Saperstein, jeering. “I’m sorry, Your Grace, but it just won’t wash, either scientifically or theologically.”

— James K. Morrow

I stand before you today not as your hypothetical descendant but as the ambassador of my kind. The statistics, as you may know, are appalling: two of us sloughed off for every six who make it into the world. In all of history, there was never a more prolific abortionist than God Almighty. Make sure the tribunal learns that fact.

— James K. Morrow

He set down the paddle, lowered his head, and, as tears squirted from his eyes, began pondering the curious fact that in the entire Book of Job the sufferer never once lamented the loss of his children.

— James K. Morrow

“He said we’d learn the answers!”“‘I’m Not Returning Immediately.’”

— James K. Morrow

Although covetousness is not my only flaw, it seems to cause me more pain than all my other sins combined.

— James K. Morrow

If nothing else, their adventure had proved that God was not about to put science out of business.

— James K. Morrow

“Origen cut off his own balls,” Martin informed Randall.“Faith.”

— James K. Morrow

“How’re you feeling?”“I highly recommend cancer. It’s worth it just for the drugs.”

— James K. Morrow

“I’ve always wondered: are snake handlers in it for the religious ecstasy or merely for the ritualized masturbation?” asked Funkeldune.

— James K. Morrow

To close the gap between jurisprudence and justice would require a canon of a hundred million laws.

— James K. Morrow

Do you really think your terrestrial counterpart is living in the best of all possible worlds? Where I come from, an eighth grader would be ashamed to enter planet Earth in a junior high school science fair.

— James K. Morrow

Bitterness is not a philosophy, friend. Outrage is not an ethic. Stop counting corpses and reach a truce with the universe, or you’ll be stuck on the dung heap forever.

— James K. Morrow

“God was guilty. The best defense is the Manichaean heresy, which isn’t a defense at all, it’s—”“—an indictment.”

— James K. Morrow

Much as I hate to admit it, humanity will get along perfectly well without me. Any species that could invent the twentieth century entirely on its own doesn’t need a Prince of Darkness.

— James K. Morrow

My spirits rose: I could see the photon at the end of the tunnel.

— James K. Morrow

As Jean-Paul Sartre reminds us, in the case of human beings this metaphysic is reversed: a person’s existence precedes his essence—he is a subject among objects. The danger, says Sartre, following Heidegger, is that he will “fall” into the world of objects, becoming ever after the prisoner of arbitrary strictures masquerading as universal principles.

— James K. Morrow

I know the God hypothesis has its partisans, but, oh, what a boring idea. Where did the universe come from? He did it. How do we account for rivers and rocks and ring-tailed lemurs? He made them. Ho-hum.

— James K. Morrow

“Which alternative is worse, I wonder?” she said. “To deny death and thus risk never being wholly alive, or to face oblivion squarely and risk paralysis by dread?”“If I ever get to be God,” she said, unleashing the grin of the person who’d invented Largesse, “my first act will be to make ambiguity illegal.”

— James K. Morrow

“Ah, yes, the spiritual realm.” In those days “spiritual” was my least favorite word. It still is.

— James K. Morrow

Dexter Padula, a member of that ubiquitous academic breed, the professional graduate student, forever revising his dissertation while eyeing external reality with the anxious demeanor of a nursing infant struggling to imagine life beyond the tit.

— James K. Morrow

Neither Dexter nor I knew the first thing about running a small business. We were entrepreneurs the way Abbott and Costello were watercolorists. And so naturally it came to pass that Pieces of Mind was a hands-down, thumbs-up, flat-out success.

— James K. Morrow

The undergraduates lamented the high price of textbooks and the equally outrageous fact that they were expected to read them.

— James K. Morrow

Fair are the daughters of men, and fairest are those who read. Is there any creature more desirable than a damsel in intellectual distress?

— James K. Morrow

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.

— James K. Morrow

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

— James K. Morrow

Those who can kill themselves do, and those who can’t, teach philosophy.

— James K. Morrow

“Your disciples will expect something even grander from you. They’ll want you to become a deity.”“When it comes to the physics, no, but in other areas—you’re right.”

— James K. Morrow

“The state flower of New Jersey is the common violet,” she explained, smirking, “the state bird is the eastern goldfinch, and the state fragrance is unrefined petroleum.”

— James K. Morrow

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.

— James K. Morrow

“A golden age, Londa calls it. She hopes it will return.”“Golden ages rarely return,” I said “especially if they never existed.”

— James K. Morrow

“If Western Europe and the United States committed seven billion dollars annually to the cause of clean drinking water worldwide, that investment would save four thousand lives a day”...“Seven billion dollars. That’s less than what Europeans spend each year for perfume and Americans for cosmetic surgery. Before he went to the gallows, Enoch Anthem spoke often about Christ turning water into wine, but he never once implored Christendom to turn perfume into water.”

— James K. Morrow

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.

— James K. Morrow

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.

— James K. Morrow

I wish more English teachers helped their students engage the classics at the level of raw delight, instead of putting them on the scent of symbols. A novel is not a cryptogram.

— James K. Morrow