James K. Morrow Quotes

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

Sleep well, gentlemen, for tomorrow we become connoisseurs of shite.

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

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

[ ... ] 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.

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.

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

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

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

We need to keep domesticating religion. It's such an unpredictable beast.

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.

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

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

Murray crossed the sandy lawn using the cautious, inoffensive gait any prudent Jew might adopt under the circumstances,

All's fair in love and dialectical materialism,

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

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.

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.

Abide with me, fleshling, and I shall teach you to run with the fluxions.

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.

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.

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.

(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.

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.

Fair are the daughters of men, and fairest are those who read.

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.

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

Ockham's disposable razors

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.

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.