James K. Morrow Quotes & Sayings

Be happy to, I said, cringing to hear such a dumb, folksy locution escape my lips, then launched into my well-rehearsed precis. The fact that humankind now finds itself in a post-Darwinian epistemological condition, I explained, need not trouble us from an ethical perspective. — James K. Morrow

There was an otherworldly quality about him, the aura of one privy to secret communiques in forgotten languages. — James K. Morrow

The Enlightenment may have indeed outlived its usefulness, but it is only through Reason's protocols that one can make a coherent case for Reason's limitations. O ye of little skepticism, kindly acknowledge your debt to that idiom on which you so glibly heap scorn. — James K. Morrow

At last my liaison pulled up before a squat structure of poured concrete buttressed with steel, bleak and featureless, like a sepulcher for people who didn't believe in an afterlife. — James K. Morrow

Above all, the Stoics sought wisdom, a condition that I myself hope to achieve after I stop wrecking and burning things. — James K. Morrow

A universe without coincidence would be an exceedingly strange place xxx — James K. Morrow

WARNING: THE SURGEON GENERAL'S CRUSADE AGAINST THIS PRODUCT MAY DISTRACT YOU FROM THE MYRIAD WAYS YOUR GOVERNMENT FAILS TO PROTECT YOUR HEALTH. — James K. Morrow

Unless I miss my guess, Yolly is about to become obsessed with horses. It's practically a stage on Piaget's developmental profile. — James K. Morrow

Abide with me, fleshling, and I shall teach you to run with the fluxions. — James K. Morrow

All's fair in love and dialectical materialism, — James K. Morrow

(On stoicism) "As a matter of fact, the experiment has already started. Yesterday at lunch I had a smaller piece of pecan pie than usual, and I passed up the scoop of vanilla ice cream entirely. It's like I said in my essay. 'Just as nature abhors a vacuum, a Stoic abhors satiety.' What's more, as you may have noticed, I've stopped smoking."
"But not swearing."
"I'm working on it."
...
"The stoics believed that in bearing pain without complain, a mortal might transcend the mundane world and enter the eternal matrix of divine thought. — James K. Morrow

A human life was measured out in bouquets, was it not? New mothers received them. So did graduating seniors, young lovers, blushing brides, and the dead. A flower woman was time's avatar, colorizing the hours, perfuming fleeting instants. — James K. Morrow

The heart is a pump, xxx weak and fickle as any other machine, and sometimes an embolism of indifference stops affection's flow. — James K. Morrow

If a cavalcade of organized killing has nothing to teach us, I don't know what does. — James K. Morrow

Blessed are the mendacious, for they shall grow wealthy beyond their wildest dreams. — James K. Morrow

Books don't repeat the same words over and over. The Gulliver's Travels whose whimsey amused you at twelve is not the Gulliver's Travels whose acid engaged you at thirty. — James K. Morrow

There are no atheists in foxholes isn't an argument against atheism, it's an argument against foxholes. — James K. Morrow

Sleep well, gentlemen, for tomorrow we become connoisseurs of shite. — James K. Morrow

Alas, for all my knowledge and my skill, The world's mysterious meaning mocks me still, And yet I shan't persuade myself that I Must bow before a supernatural will. — James K. Morrow

The sea is a dangerous place for a woman," said Mr. Chadwick, nodding. "So is dry land," said Chloe. — James K. Morrow

Throughout history the community of readers has been prey to sinister forces - to pedants and priests, legislators and lunatics, deities and demagogues. You have paid for your passion in humiliation, mutilation, and sometimes even - as when Henry VIII burned Bible translator William Tyndale as a heretic - immolation. I salute you all, as do my fellow books. — James K. Morrow

Let's admit it, people: nobody understands consciousness. Psychology hasn't had a Newton yet. — James K. Morrow

Manichean dualism is the single worst idea people ever came up with - this notion that you can divide humankind into the children of light and the children of darkness. — James K. Morrow

Ockham's disposable razors — James K. Morrow

The next time somebody announces that he plans to get Medieval on your ass, tell him you're going to get Renaissance on his gonads. — James K. Morrow

I joined the army to learn how to kill my father. An irony; the only time the old man ever showed a glimmer of satisfaction with me was when I announced I was dropping out of college and enlisting. He thought I wanted to make the world safe for democracy, when in fact I wanted to make it safe from him. I intended to sign up under a false name. Become competent with a rifle. Then one night, while my father slept, I would sneak away from basic training, press the muzzle to his head - Harry Hines the failed and violent Pennsylvania farmer, Harry Hines the wife abuser and son beater, laying into me with his divining rods till my back was freckled with slivers of hazelwood - and blast him to Satan's backyard while he dreamed whatever dreams go through such a man's mind. — James K. Morrow

All I ask, Madam, is to share with thee a common center of gravity. — James K. Morrow

One day the world will notice that while E=mc2 ultimately gives you 177,000 dead Japanese civilians, F=ma lets you skate across a frozen lake on a winter's night, the wind caressing your face as you glide toward the hot-chocolate stand on the far shore. — James K. Morrow

The precise metaphysical procedures by which a book goes about writing another book need not concern us here. Suffice to say that our human scribes remain entirely ignorant of their possession by bibliographic forces; the agent in question never doubts that his authorship is authentic. — James K. Morrow

Our policy is impossible to justify on rational grounds, which is why we've started invoking national security and other shibboleths. — James K. Morrow

The tragedy of my species xxx is that it does not live in its own time. Homo sapiens is locked on history's rearview mirror, never the road ahead, bent on catching some presumed lost paradise xxx
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The human race is destroying itself with nostalgia ... — James K. Morrow

Face it, people, there is more to your malaise than celestial mechanics. If you want to know why you feel so bad, you must look beyond universal gravitation. — James K. Morrow

4091 East Olympic Boulevard proved to be a nondescript one-storey sandstone building of the sort you drive blithely by every day, knowing it's full of paper-pushers and clock-watchers, and nobody's in there writing a symphony or taming a lion or having an orgasm. — James K. Morrow

At the heart of all truth lies a radiant cloud of unknowing, a glorious nugget of doubt, a shining core of impermanence. — James K. Morrow

Murray crossed the sandy lawn using the cautious, inoffensive gait any prudent Jew might adopt under the circumstances, — James K. Morrow

If there is a god, I think he has a sense of humour. He does not require human beings to protect him from satire. — James K. Morrow

They introduced themselves as Agent Jones and Agent Brown - their real names, I later learned, though at the time I didn't believe them. — James K. Morrow

The odor of bowel wind is known to every human, but the fragrance of book glue has crossed only a fraction of mortal nostrils. And yet it behooves us not to judge the unlettered too harshly. We must stay the impulse to write CHUCKLEHEAD above their doors and carve DOLT upon their tombstones. — James K. Morrow

[ ... ] as Kurt Vonnegut pointed out [ ... ] the literary novel has become extraordinarily privatistic of late. It's as if the big issues (Does God exist? from whence springs decency? what sort of species is Homo Sapiens?) were either settled or not worth discusssing, and serious writers should therefore confine themselves to their various ethnic heritages and interpersonal relationships. — James K. Morrow

God's penis would still rank high among those vistas a priest and a nun could not comfortably share. — James K. Morrow

Do you realize there was a time when the United States of America actually made sense? A time when you could look at a Norman Rockwell painting of a GI peeling potatoes for Mom and get all choked up and nobody'd laugh at you? — James K. Morrow

I made the only decision I ever knew how to make,' Truman famously asserted in one of his carefully scripted reminiscences. What does that mean, exactly? Did Truman see himself as a professional decision-maker with a narrow specialty, the choice between destroying and not destroying Japanese cities? — James K. Morrow

You speak of Sorcery. It so happens that in the investigations leading first to my Conjectures concerning Light and later to my System of the World, I fell upon a pretty Proof that Wicked Spirits enjoy no essential Existence, being but Desires of the Mind. — James K. Morrow

We need to keep domesticating religion. It's such an unpredictable beast. — James K. Morrow

This was not a just war after all - it was just a war: yet another exercise in consecrated barbarity and sanctified slaughter. — James K. Morrow

Fair are the daughters of men, and fairest are those who read. — James K. Morrow