James K. Morrow

"Don’t bring your petty little human perspective to the matter, Dr. Onslo. To a vulture, carrion tastes like chocolate cake."

"Bobby asked him what it was like to be insane. “There is nothing that being insane is like,” Rupert replied."

"Oh, Robespierre, Robespierre, was the triumph of inadvertence over intention ever so total?"

"“Love Jesus, embrace your inner storm trooper, and leave the planet a more miserable place than you found it—that’s Christian nihilism in a nutshell,” said Whip Hemsoth. “If there’s a better path to fulfilling your purpose and engorging your wedding member, I haven’t found it.”"

"Monotheism is just one of the myths by which we live, and Yahweh is just one of the deities who populate these stories."

"My friends in the nouveau paganism camp accuse me of quaintness: Bible thumpers are straw men, so why bother?...My answer is that straw men, once set aflame with zeal, can be quite dangerous, and that the gap between New Age irrationalism and Christian fundamentalism is not nearly so wide as we might wish to believe."

"When I destroyed my unwanted children, it was murder. When Yahweh did the same, it was eugenics. Do you approve of the universe, Ham?"

"Being God, I must choose My words carefully. People, I’ve noticed, tend to hang on to My every remark. It gets annoying, this servile and sycophantic streak in Homo sapiens sapiens. There’s a difference, after all, between tasteful adulation and arrant toadyism, but they just don’t get it."

"If You intervene too profusely in Earth’s affairs, I’ve noticed, the inhabitants become chronically distracted, and they forget to worship You."

"I’ve gone insane, Michael decided, retrieving a cowhide-bound appointments book from his valise. Only certifiable schizophrenics showed meetings with God on their calendars."

"“In fact, there’s probably only one thing worse than not being able to understand a person.” “What’s that?” asked Nimrod. “Being able to understand him completely.”"

"Let us examine the language here. Evidently God is addressing this code to a patriarchy that will in turn disseminate it among the less powerful, namely wives and servants. And how long before these servants are downgraded further still...into slaves, even? Ten whole commandments, and not one word against slavery, not to mention bigotry, misogyny, or war."

"As with all things political, the issue was power."

"“You see, Ebenezer, charity begs a crucial question. How did the bestower attain the position from which he now exercises his largesse?” My dead colleague cleaned his teeth with one of his many appended keys. “Through imagination and merit? Or through inherited privilege and ruthless exploitation?”"

"JOB. And now it’s time... FRANNY. To curse God... JOB. And live."

"My own preliminary diagnosis is that I am out of my skull and getting farther from its vicinity every day."

"Let’s just hope that gravity isn’t as heavy as it used to be..."

"Burne was tough. Burne practiced archeology, the most inconvenient of the sciences."

"The new homeland bulged with the sort of free-for-the-grabbing bounty that invites greed, envy, exploitation, profiteering, and politics."

"People found ever more ingenious ways to hate each other."

"Smugness kills all utopias."

"Children, being close to the ground, have a special rapport with insects."

"The world’s odd tolerance of fighting cropped up again and again in Francis’s study of history, particularly ancient history. On Earth, where his remotest forebears lived, a person could be indisputably responsible for the deaths of thousands and still go down in the history books as some sort of great hero. This was before Francis understood the biological inevitability of violence, so he was bewildered. Why, he wanted to know, were the names of Samson, Napoleon, Joan of Arc, Ulysses S. Grant, and Julius Caesar not obscenities, spoken after dark in whispers of revulsion and shame? The same teachers who couldn’t bring themselves to say shitbrain or ortwaddle openly discussed Alexander the Great. He never found anyone who had the answer. Until he got to Planet Carlotta, he never even found anyone who had the question."

"Luli turned out to be uncompromising and brilliant. She could prosecute honey before a jury of bears and win."

"In physical pursuits Luli was considerably less passionate. Her idea of a good time in bed was breakfast."

"Francis’s office did not come with a videophone; at times he was surprised that his office came with a floor."

"It is far more arrogant to profess intuitive knowledge of the sacred than scientific knowledge of the tangible."

"It was not a question of regressive old ideas versus enlightened new ideas, but of reasonable caution versus arrogant caprice."

"She was by some standards slovenly, failing to see any virtue in made beds, since, as she put it, you are either asleep or somewhere else. On her birthdays she was sad. This tradition traced to earliest childhood, when she had consistently misinterpreted her birthday parties to mean that she was dying. Why else would the world be going to such exorbitant lengths to cheer her up? Science was her first love. Long after the preschool years, she aspired to know the why of everything. Why babies had a Babinski reflex, and why the reflex disappeared. Why people licked their upper lips when concentrating, and why there was humor. Tez wanted to understand light. She wanted to solve mud, decipher rocks, and unlock grass."

"Francis had always been ecumenical in his atheism. He was as prepared to disbelieve in this Tolca character as he was to disbelieve in Yahweh, Jesus, Buddha, Vishnu, or any of the other words for what his father used to call “forcing yourself to misperceive the obvious.”"

"“I’ve always regretted not having a brother. Maybe I shouldn’t.” “For me it’s always been like having pubic hair. You have it, but what the hell is it for?”"

"“On your planet, how do you tell somebody that you love her?” “It’s very complicated. You say, ‘I love you,’ and then you stand back and see what happens.”"

"“Everyone here does think as I do,” replied Nefertiti Jones’s double, “and consequently I have no enemies.”"

"In Francis’s view there was ultimate gold in this commitment to impractical knowledge, to theories that had no responsibilities other than to be true. On good days the new ideas inched human intellect toward the grand understandings that were science’s pride and joy."

"Tez always had warm feelings about paradoxes. It was the scientist in her."

"Francis realized he was afflicted with what his father used to term “an erection of the curiosity organ.”"

"Someday that man will be astonished to discover there’s a whole world marching along outside his buzzing head."

"Like most visionaries, The Teller saw the distant future with optical-glass clarity, the intermediate future with beeswax clarity, and the immediate future with the clarity of dark glasses dipped in tar."

"Nature may not be benign, but she is reliable."

"Forgive me if I’m confusing you with logic."

"Like all good friends, they hated seeing their relationship lose its emotional innocence, its chastity of good will, and now that the thing was lost, now that searing statements had changed hands and left scars, neither looked forward to the future."

"Every religion says war is evil, but one way or another they end up playing along."

"“That was a very pretty speech,” said Loloc, “but if it contained an answer to even one of my questions then I did not hear it.”"

"“Zolmec,” said Nazra, “has always taught that the greatest words are ‘I could very well be wrong.’”"

"Often Burne found himself saying, “I don’t think you would make a very good soldier,” and with grating predictability he heard that he wouldn’t make a very good pacifist."

"Sneer, frown, and be miserable, for tomorrow you live."

"A second slash ended the monster’s misery. So, he thought, this is how my Earthling ancestors ran their affairs. This is how lands were won, empires expanded, insurrections resisted, prisoners taken, slaves kept, heretics converted, captives made loquacious. For the first time in his life, Minnix felt himself a part of history. History, he decided, was a terrible idea."

"“As a race of scientists and thinkers,” she concluded, “we cannot claim with absolute certainty that Teot Yon’s personality is now beyond Heaven’s gates or inside Satan’s stewpot or about to enter the embryo of a bull. Some of us subscribe to the Afterworld Hypothesis, some to less cheerful views. We all know that as an empirical event Teot Yon’s existence is over, and it is time for his molecules to become air and ash and after that—where will his drifting pieces go and what new things will they help to form? Let the transformation begin!”"

"Father says don’t kill your principles just because the government is paying for the funeral."

"There’s no objective evidence for an afterlife, and anecdotal reports of heaven cannot be distinguished from wishful thinking, self-delusion, and the effects of oxygen loss on the brain."