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The Last Witchfinder QUOTES

The Last Witchfinder QUOTES

1 " The next time somebody announces that he plans to get Medieval on your ass, tell him you're going to get Renaissance on his gonads. "

― James K. Morrow , The Last Witchfinder

2 " I have never known any distress that an hour's reading did not relieve. "

― James K. Morrow , The Last Witchfinder

3 " Books don't repeat the same words over and over. The Gulliver's Travels whose whimsey amused you at twelve is not the Gulliver's Travels whose acid engaged you at thirty. "

― James K. Morrow , The Last Witchfinder

4 " ...throughout history the community of readers has been prey to sinister forces - to pedants and priests, legislators and lunatics, deities and demagogues. You have paid for your passion in humiliation, mutilation, and sometimes even - as when Henry VIII burned Bible translator William Tyndale as a heretic - immolation. I salute you all, as do my fellow books. "

― James K. Morrow , The Last Witchfinder

5 " ...one day the world will notice that while E=mc2 ultimately gives you 177,000 dead Japanese civilians, F=ma lets you skate across a frozen lake on a winter's night, the wind caressing your face as you glide toward the hot-chocolate stand on the far shore. "

― James K. Morrow , The Last Witchfinder

6 " The precise metaphysical procedures by which a book goes about writing another book need not concern us here. Suffice to say that our human scribes remain entirely ignorant of their possession by bibliographic forces; the agent in question never doubts that his authorship is authentic. "

― James K. Morrow , The Last Witchfinder

7 " Face it, people, there is more to your malaise than celestial mechanics. If you want to know why you feel so bad, you must look beyond universal gravitation. "

― James K. Morrow , The Last Witchfinder

8 " Let's admit it, people: nobody understands consciousness. Psychology hasn't had a Newton yet. "

― James K. Morrow , The Last Witchfinder

9 " The Enlightenment may have indeed outlived its usefulness, but it is only through Reason's protocols that one can make a coherent case for Reason's limitations. O ye of little skepticism, kindly acknowledge your debt to that idiom on which you so glibly heap scorn. "

― James K. Morrow , The Last Witchfinder

10 " All I ask, Madam, is to share with thee a common center of gravity. "

― James K. Morrow , The Last Witchfinder

11 " Abide with me, fleshling, and I shall teach you to run with the fluxions. "

― James K. Morrow , The Last Witchfinder

12 " You speak of Sorcery. It so happens that in the investigations leading first to my Conjectures concerning Light and later to my System of the World, I fell upon a pretty Proof that Wicked Spirits enjoy no essential Existence, being but Desires of the Mind. "

― James K. Morrow , The Last Witchfinder

13 " One hundred and seventy years later, readers had to contend with Socrates's pronouncement that books are useless artifacts. Literary works cannot explain what they say, the great philosopher argued — they can only repeat the same words over and over. To me this sounds less like the definition of a book than a Heideggerian, but in any event Socrates clearly missed the point. Books don't repeat the same words over and over again. The Gulliver's Travels whose whimsy amused you at twelve is not the Gulliver's Travels whose acid engaged you at thirty. "

― James K. Morrow , The Last Witchfinder