James K. Morrow - People Quotes

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Don't believe everything you hear about hell. Next time you run into some anti-hell propaganda, consider the source.
You inflict eternal punishment on people, Julie countered.
Merely because it's our job. And remember, we persecute only the guilty, which puts us one up on most other institutions.

James K. Morrow
What most people don't realize is that something unprecedented has entered the world. Bang—science—and suddenly a proposition is true because it's true, Julie, not because its adherents have the biggest churches or the grandest inquisitors or the most weeks on The New York Times bestseller list.

James K. Morrow
Pop, do we have heaven? he'd asked on the day he discovered the (dead) cat. You want to know a Jew's idea of heaven? his father had replied, looking up from his Maimonides. It's an endless succession of long winter nights on which we get paid a fair wage to sit in a warm room and read all the books ever written... Not just the famous ones, no, every book, the stuff nobody gets around to reading, forgotten plays, novels by people you never heard of. However, I profoundly doubt such a place exists.

James K. Morrow
I'm really interested in this stuff. Julie rubbed a carton labeled ELEMENTARY PARTICLES.
Physics?
Physics, biology, stars, everything.
Howard said, Good for you. These days most people prefer to impoverish their minds with mysticism.

James K. Morrow
The problem is, only a few people get to be scientists. You see the dilemma? Given the choice between a truth they can appreciate and a lie they can live, most people will take you-know-what.

James K. Morrow
You want a motive, William? I've got a motive. Vengeance may not be a pretty word, but it's what's expected of us.
Right! said Sverre. We owe it to all those millions of dead people to make more millions of dead people. Be careful how you rewrite strategic doctrine, General, or you'll come out of this war without a single medal.

James K. Morrow
The real reason Charles Darwin distresses people, I would argue, is not that he stumbled on an argument against theism. No, the problem was that he replaced theism—replaced it with a construct more beautiful and majestic than any account of the Supreme Being outside the Book of Job, a construct that invites us to see every variety of life, from aphids to archbishops, zygotes to zoologists, as vibrant threads in an epic tapestry, its warp and woof stretching across the eons and back to the Precambrian ooze, the seminal sea-vents, the primordial clay-pits, or wherever it all began. An astonishing construct, a mind-boggling construct, a construct of which Jehovah is understandably and insanely jealous.

James K. Morrow
People are always asking, does God exist? Of course she does. The real question: what is she like?

James K. Morrow