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 K. Morrow, The Last Witchfinder: A Novel

“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

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

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

“There are no atheists in foxholes" isn't an argument against atheism, it's an argument against foxholes.”
― 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, Towing Jehovah

“...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: A Novel

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

“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: A Novel

“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, Shambling Towards Hiroshima

“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, Shambling Towards Hiroshima

“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, Shambling Towards Hiroshima

“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: A Novel

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

“...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: A Novel

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

“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: A Novel

“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: A Novel

“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: A Novel