James Morrow

Quotes

1. “God was guilty. The best defense is the Manichaean heresy, which isn’t a defense at all, it’s—”

   “Never mind about that.”

   “—an indictment.”

   p. 394

2. 

   “Origen cut off his own balls,” Martin informed Randall.

   “Prostate cancer?”

   “Faith.”

   p. 328

3. 

   “I am what I am. I am Christ and Antichrist, God and Satan, Heaven and Hiroshima, Arcadia and Auschwitz.” Smiling devilishly, Sarkos lumbered up to Lovett. “Get it, fat boy? God is a duality. Dr. Jehovah and Mr. Hyde.” He lobbed the bottle cap into his mouth and chewed. “Allow me to tell you a bedtime story. It’s called ‘The Day the Gas Chambers Malfunctioned at Auschwitz.’ On second thought, why bother? You know the plot—the title gives it away—I’m surprised Braverman and Kelvin left it out of their overblown epic. Can you imagine how it feels to be a seven-year-old Jewish child, standing in line with hundreds of other Jewish children, waiting your turn to be thrown alive onto an open fire?” Swallowing the bottle cap, Sarkos swerved toward Martin. “Don’t you see? It’s the only solution that can possibly work. No other theory comes close. Of course God has a dark side. Not just dark—evil. Radically, radically evil.”

   p. 390

4. 

   Much as I hate to admit it, humanity will get along perfectly well without me. Any species that could invent the twentieth century entirely on its own doesn’t need a Prince of Darkness.

   p. 402

5. 

   “How’re you feeling?”

   “I highly recommend cancer. It’s worth it just for the drugs.”

   p. 361

6. 

   “You aspired to be God’s advocate, you got the job, you performed admirably. But God’s advocate was ipso facto my advocate. Theodicy’s a sucker’s game, Professor. When Yahweh was operational, humanity’s obligation wasn’t to worship Him, for chrissakes. It was to celebrate His creativity and stand forevermore opposed to His malice. And anybody such as yourself, anybody who sought to shoehorn an omnibenevolent God into the same universe as Auschwitz...that person, Dr. Gregory Francis Lovett—that person did the Devil’s work for him.”

   p. 391

7. 

   Bitterness is not a philosophy, friend. Outrage is not an ethic. Stop counting corpses and reach a truce with the universe, or you’ll be stuck on the dung heap forever.

   p. 392

8. 

   If nothing else, their adventure had proved that God was not about to put science out of business.

   p. 259

9. 

   To close the gap between jurisprudence and justice would require a canon of a hundred million laws.

   p. 383

10. 

    “I’ve always wondered: are snake handlers in it for the religious ecstasy or merely for the ritualized masturbation?” asked Funkeldune.

    p. 370

11. 

    Do you really think your terrestrial counterpart is living in the best of all possible worlds? Where I come from, an eighth grader would be ashamed to enter planet Earth in a junior high school science fair.

    p. 387

12. 

    Somehow his grandfather had wrought an honorable and glamorous life from the sea. But that era was gone. The system was dying. Advising a young man to join the United States Merchant Marine was like advising him to go into vaudeville.

    p. 44