Morris Collins > Quotes

“Between your past and future there is your ridiculous present. Not everything was a mistake you had to make:”
― Morris Collins, The Tavern at the End of History

“The Talmud tells that every person has a secret name and for every name there is an angel who knows it. The secret name is given to us at birth by our parents, or just whispered by them to themselves in the dark, or passed between their mouths during conception, or dreamed and never spoken, and it contains in its syllables the entirety of our character. It is to this that our angel, the angel that knows our name, bears witness and it is this that the angel, when the time comes, proclaims before the Lord.”
― Morris Collins, The Tavern at the End of History

“All of us who are not dust have some luck.”
― Morris Collins, The Tavern at the End of History

“theology was a bulwark to fear, an attempt to wrangle chaos into the geometry of logic. The Talmudists, Kabbalists, the Rabbis, the medieval philosophers had excelled at this—you take an ancient story, a myth, a plague, bad luck or bad weather, a burning temple, exile, diaspora, and like a watch, you pop off the back and find the perfect, unceasing, hidden movement, the rightness of the world still at work. And yet, against the Shoah, while the impulse to make sense remained, the machinery broke down. The theologians were left with either disbelief, heresy, or desperate rationalization. Against the Shoah, theology failed, reason failed, the human talent to comprehend, make excuse, or give comfort to itself collapsed. There remained only faith and faith made for bad theology; there remained only faith and against the Shoah faith looked like delusion.”
― Morris Collins, The Tavern at the End of History

“even though we were waiting, we did not think of the future. We were waiting, but only for the end of the present.”
― Morris Collins, The Tavern at the End of History

“The covenant with the Jews is less a contract than a human interpretation of causality—if I do this, the Lord does that. But His discourse with Job dismisses causality entirely. Understanding is beyond His nature, His nature is beyond His nature. Consider Adam and Eve’s mistake—eating from the Tree of Knowledge. God does not simply surpass our understanding. His paradise is antithetical to it.”
― Morris Collins, The Tavern at the End of History

“This is where you are. Which was what everybody wanted. To arrive at their life’s crisis and have the good fortune to know it.”
― Morris Collins, The Tavern at the End of History

“I have chosen not to invent what shouldn’t have been imagined.”
― Morris Collins, The Tavern at the End of History

“For him safety was not the absence of possible harm, but a series of routines to ward off surprise when the inevitable violence occurred.”
― Morris Collins, The Tavern at the End of History

“Of the essential functions of the universe, which of course I do not claim to even begin to apprehend, what can be transmitted? The Kabbalah would suggest that nothing can. Or everything, but what we recognize as having been transmitted is, by its very essence, what hasn’t been transmitted. Or in the process of being exposed to our understanding has been leeched of its fundamental meaning.”
― Morris Collins, The Tavern at the End of History

“To require signs you didn’t believe in was just another kind of denial.”
― Morris Collins, The Tavern at the End of History

“Remembering is the easy part. Knowing what to do with memory, well there...”
― Morris Collins, The Tavern at the End of History