Quotes from James K. Morrow

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.

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.

At the heart of all truth lies a radiant cloud of unknowing, a glorious nugget of doubt, a shining core of impermanence.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

If there is a god, I think he has a sense of humour. He does not require human beings to protect him from satire.

A universe without coincidence would be an exceedingly strange place xxx

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.

All I ask, Madam, is to share with thee a common center of gravity.

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

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.

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.

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

If there is a god, I think he has a sense of humour. He does not require human beings to protect him from satire.

The house looked like a meeting place for an extraterrestrial chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.

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

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

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

WARNING: THE SURGEON GENERAL'S CRUSADE AGAINST THIS PRODUCT MAY DISTRACT YOU FROM THE MYRIAD WAYS YOUR GOVERNMENT FAILS TO PROTECT YOUR HEALTH.

Do you realize there was a time when the United States of America actually made sense? A time when you could look at a Norman Rockwell painting of a GI peeling potatoes for Mom and get all choked up and nobody'd laugh at you?