James Morrow

Quotes

1. —Then there is the final possibility, my favorite.

   —Yes?

   —The final possibility is that I’m God.

   —You’re God?

   —Just a theory, but the data are provocative. I mean, look at me. Faceless, shapeless, holey, undifferentiated, Jewish, inscrutable...and a hermaphrodite to boot. Years ago, I told you sponges cannot be fatally dismembered, for each part quickly becomes the whole. To wit, I am both immortal and infinite.

   —You’re God? You’re God herself? You?

   —The data are provocative.

   —God is a sponge? A sponge? There’s not much comfort in that.

   —Agreed.

   —Sponges can’t help us.

   —Neither can God, as far as I can tell. I’d be happy to see some contrary data.

   p. 312

2. 

   Better a citizen in hell than a slave in New Jersey.

   p. 162

3. 

   She asked, “Do you believe science has all the answers?”

   “Huh?”

   “Science. Does it have all the answers?”

   “Everybody thinks he’s being oh-so-deep when he says science doesn’t have all the answers.”

   Done. All of it. Virginity gone, flesh ratified, mother spited, mission discovered—the gospel of empirical truth! Yes! Oh, yes!

   “Science does have all the answers,” said Howard, withdrawing. “The problem is that we don’t have all the science.”

   p. 90

4. 

   “Pop, do we have heaven?” he’d asked on the day he discovered the (dead) cat. “You want to know a Jew’s idea of heaven?” his father had replied, looking up from his Maimonides. “It’s an endless succession of long winter nights on which we get paid a fair wage to sit in a warm room and read all the books ever written...Not just the famous ones, no, every book, the stuff nobody gets around to reading, forgotten plays, novels by people you never heard of. However, I profoundly doubt such a place exists.”

   p. 13

5. 

   The wonders of nature, she learned, from wing of bee to sonar of bat to eyeball of baby, were not so much perfect machines as adequate contraptions. If nature bespoke a mind, it was a confused and inchoate one, a mind incapable of locating the optic nerve on the correct side of the retina, a mind unable to accomplish much of anything without resort to jerry-building and extinction.

   p. 254

6. 

   There are none so blind as those who see angels...None so deaf as those who hear gods.

   p. 288

7. 

   Murray held his daughter at arm’s length. “Does God...er, visit you?”

   “She doesn’t even whisper to me. I listen, but she doesn’t talk. It’s not fair.”

   God didn’t talk. The best news he’d heard since Gabriel Frostig announced his embryo. “Look Julie, it’s good she doesn’t talk. God asks her children to do crazy things. It’s good she doesn’t whisper. Understand?”

   “I guess.”

   “Really?”

   “Uh-huh. Where’d the crab go? Is he looking for his friends?”

   A profound weariness pressed upon Murray. “Yes. Right. His friends. It’s good God doesn’t whisper.”

   p. 46

8. 

   Babies are like kittens, Julie, they grow into something much more sinister.

   p. 258

9. 

   Her libido blazed to life. She smiled, impressed by the party-crashing shamelessness of sex, its willingness to show up anywhere—a funeral, a sermon, a final farewell. This was the way to go out, all right, thumbing your labia at the cosmos.

   p. 285

10. 

    “Right before bed, I spend twenty minutes in this place. Then I can sleep.”

    “You mean you simply sit here, staring at everybody’s pain? All you do is look at it?”

    “Uh-huh. Just like God.”

    p. 74

11. 

    “You’re not very religious, are you?” said Irene.

    “I’m more into gravity.”

    p. 256

12. 

    Hell was not perfect, but it was paradise compared with New Jersey.

    p. 174