James Morrow

Quotes

1. For many citizens of the Western world, this situation proved, as you might imagine, troubling—especially in the United States, where reality has never enjoyed a great deal of prestige.

   p. 129

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. 

   “And what are you?”

   “Me? I knew God was dead even before the corpse showed up.”

   p. 62

8. 

   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

9. 

   That night Martin read the Book of Job for the first time in thirty years, discovering to his surprise it was a kind of courtroom drama, with the perverse twist that the Accused also functioned as Judge and Jury. Equally disturbing was the fact that when God went to make His case, He completely ignored Job’s main concern—justice—opting instead to intimidate him with the majesty of Creation: lions, whales, horses, hail, stars, and, ultimately, the unknowable monsters Behemoth and Leviathan.

   A rigged proceeding, yes, and yet Martin found it gripping. He was moved by both the force of Job’s bitterness and the caliber of his blasphemy.

   p. 76

10. 

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

    p. 73

11. 

    “I don’t see you at Mass anymore.”

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

    p. 137

12. 

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

    p. 213