Towing Jehovah

Quotes

1. 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

2. 

   “Another boyfriend?”

   “A character in one of my plays. Runkleberg’s my twentieth-century Abraham. One fine morning he’s out watering his roses, and he hears God’s voice telling him to sacrifice his son.”

   “Does he obey?”

   “His wife intervenes.”

   “How?”

   “She castrates him with his hedge clippers, and he bleeds to death.”

   p. 71

3. 

   Sweetie, if I’ve learned anything during my ten years at sea, it’s this. Never confuse your captain with God.

   p. 74

4. 

   Under the midnight sun, despair acquires the intensity of sex, insomnia the vehemence of art.

   p. 337

5. 

   “It’s tragic,” he said.

   “God killed them with His hurricane,” she said.

   “God had nothing to do with it.”

   “Actually I agree with you, though for reasons quite different from yours.”

   p. 69

6. 

   Her audacity turned him on. There was nobody quite so arousing, he decided, as a worthy opponent.

   p. 298

7. 

   To Thomas’s eye, Union Square combined the exoticism of The Arabian Nights with the bedrock banality of American commerce, as if a medieval Persian bazaar had been transplanted to the twentieth century and taken over by Wal-Mart.

   p. 29

8. 

   It was the most portentous mission since Saul of Tarsus has suffered an epileptic seizure and called it Christianity.

   p. 73

9. 

   “I don’t see you at Mass anymore.”

   “It’s like fucking, Father. You gotta be up for it.”

   p. 137

10. 

    That maxim, it’s not an argument against atheism—it’s an argument against foxholes.

    p. 213

11. 

    When Cassie Fowler awoke, she was less shocked to discover that an afterlife existed than to find that she, of all people, had been admitted to it. Her entire adulthood, it seemed, year after year of spiting the Almighty and saluting the Enlightenment, had come to nothing. She’d been saved, raptured, immortalized. Shit. The situation spoke badly of her and worse of eternity. What heaven worthy of the name would accept so ardent an unbeliever as she?

    p. 67

12. 

    She had long ago accepted the fact that, when it came to the affectations with which radical feminists liked to impoverish their minds—crystal therapy, neo-paganism, Wicca—her skepticism placed her emphatically in a minority.

    p. 72

13. 

    A corpse was far too easy a thing to rationalize. Christianity had been doing it for two thousand years.

    p. 91

14. 

    There’s nothing quite so pernicious as wishful thinking.

    p. 285

15. 

    Say “rationalist” to the average New Age chucklehead, and you conjured up unappetizing images: killjoys obsessed with rules, boors fixated on order, logic-mongers skating around on the surface of things, missing the cosmic essence. Phooey. A rationalist could experience awe as readily as a shaman. But it had to be quality awe, Oliver believed, awe without illusions—the sort of awe he’d felt upon intuiting the size of the universe, or sensing the unlikeliness of his birth.

    p. 109

16. 

    “What’s theodicy?” asked Anthony.

    “Hard to explain.”

    “Sounds like idiocy.”

    “Much of it is.”

    p. 38

17. 

    “I knew this guy one, a demac on the Amoco Cádiz, dying of bone cancer. You know what he said? ‘When they give you morphine like there’s no tomorrow, there isn’t.’”

    p. 321

18. 

    Life’s meaning doesn’t come from God! Life’s meaning comes from life!

    p. 178

That’s all the quotes.

18 quotes in the collection · come back when we add more