Quotes from James Morrow

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

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.

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

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.

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.

I have never known any distress that an hour's reading did not relieve.

Ockham's disposable razors

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

That from so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

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

Be happy to, I said, cringing to hear such a dumb, folksy locution escape my lips, then launched into my well-rehearsed precis. The fact that humankind now finds itself in a post-Darwinian epistemological condition, I explained, need not trouble us from an ethical perspective.

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

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

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.

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