James K. Morrow > Quotes

“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 Morrow, The Last Witchfinder

“There are no atheists in foxholes" isn't an argument against atheism, it's an argument against foxholes.”
― James 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 Morrow, Nebula Awards 27: Sfwa's Choices for the Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year

“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 Morrow

“I have never known any distress that an hour's reading did not relieve.”
― James Morrow, The Last Witchfinder

“Ockham's disposable razors”
― James Morrow, Towing Jehovah

“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, The Last Witchfinder

“...God's penis would still rank high among those vistas a priest and a nun could not comfortably share.”
― James Morrow, Towing Jehovah

“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 Morrow, Shambling Towards Hiroshima

“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

“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, Only Begotten Daughter

“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 Morrow, Shambling Towards Hiroshima

“All’s fair in love and dialectical materialism,”
― James Morrow, Galapagos Regained

“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

“...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 Last Witchfinder

“Above all, the Stoics sought wisdom, a condition that I myself hope to achieve after I stop wrecking and burning things.”
― James Morrow, The Philosopher's Apprentice

“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 Morrow, Shambling Towards Hiroshima

“Let's admit it, people: nobody understands consciousness. Psychology hasn't had a Newton yet.”
― James K. Morrow, The Last Witchfinder

“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, The Last Witchfinder

“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, The Last Witchfinder

“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, The Last Witchfinder

“...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, The Last Witchfinder

“I'll tell you something, though. I did not hate the lurid dreams. The best of them had an emotional reality, a core of honest sensation, that brought me nearer to aesthetic truth than did the stuff that the literati were always fussing about. Art, I believe, is where you find it.”
― James K. Morrow, The Continent of Lies

“A universe without coincidence would be an exceedingly strange place xxx”
― James K. Morrow, Only Begotten Daughter

“That from so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
― James Morrow, Galapagos Regained

“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, The Last Witchfinder

“Abide with me, fleshling, and I shall teach you to run with the fluxions.”
― James K. Morrow, The Last Witchfinder

“One hundred and seventy years later, readers had to contend with Socrates's pronouncement that books are useless artifacts. Literary works cannot explain what they say, the great philosopher argued — they can only repeat the same words over and over. To me this sounds less like the definition of a book than a Heideggerian, but in any event Socrates clearly missed the point. Books don't repeat the same words over and over again. The Gulliver's Travels whose whimsy amused you at twelve is not the Gulliver's Travels whose acid engaged you at thirty.”
― James K. Morrow, The Last Witchfinder

“I wanted a real diary, but there wasn't time to visit a stationery store, so instead I ran down to Thrift Drug and got you. According to your cover, you're an 'Official Popeye the Sailor Spiral-Bound Notebook, copyright © 1959 King Features Syndicate.' When I look into your wizened face, Popeye, I know you're a man I can trust.”
― James K. Morrow, Towing Jehovah

“All I ask, Madam, is to share with thee a common center of gravity.”
― James K. Morrow, The Last Witchfinder