Morris L. West > Quotes

“If you spend your whole life waiting for the storm, you'll never enjoy the sunshine.”
― Morris West

“One has to abandon altogether the search for security, and reach out to the risk of living with both arms. One has to court doubt and darkness as the cost of knowing.”
― Morris L. West

“I know what you are thinking - you need a sign. What better one could I give than to make this little one whole and new? I could do it, but I will not. I am the Lord and not a conjurer. I gave this mite a gift I denied to all of you - eternal innocence. To you, he looks imperfect but to me he is flawless like the bud that dies unopened or the fledgling that falls from the nest to be devoured by the ants. He will never offend me, as all of you have done. He will never pervert or destroy the work of my Father's hands. He is necessary to you. He will evoke the kindness that will keep you human. His infirmity will prompt you to gratitude for your own good fortune. More! He will remind you every day that I am who I am, that my ways are not yours, and that the smallest dust mite, while in darkest space, does not fall out of my hand. I have chosen you. You have not chosen me. This little one is my sign to you. Treasure him!”
― Morris West, The Clowns of God

“He had fallen into the error of all liberals: the belief that men are prepared to reform themselves, that good will attracts good will, that truth has leavening virtue of its own.”
― Morris L. West, The Devil's Advocate

“Each of us can walk only the path he sees at his own feet. Each of us is subject to the consequences of his own belief.”
― Morris L. West, The Devil's Advocate

“I don't believe in miracles, only unexplained facts.”
― Morris L. West, The Devil's Advocate

“I was lost a long time, without knowing it. Without the Faith, one is free, and that is a pleasant feeling at first. There are no questions of conscience, no constraints, except the constraints of custom, convention and the law, and these are flexible enough for most purposes. It is only later that terror comes. One is free - but free in chaos, in an unexplained and unexplainable world. One is free in a desert, from which there is no retreat but inward, toward the hollow core of oneself. There is nothing to build on but the small rock of one's own pride, and this is a nothing, based on nothing... I think, therefore I am. But what am I? An accident of disorder, going no place.”
― Morris L. West, The Devil's Advocate

“If you spend your life waiting for the sun you'll never enjoy the storm.”
― Morris West

“History is alwys written by victors, and the defeated create a new set of myths to explain the past and gild the future”
― Morris West

“I feel the life slipping out of me. When the pain comes, I cry out, but there is no prayer in it, only fear. I kneel and recite my office and the Rosary but the words are empty - dry gourds rattling in the silence. The dark is terrible and I feel so alone. I see no signs but the symbols of contradiction. I try to dispose myself to faith, hope and charity, but my will is a blown reed in the winds of despair.”
― Morris L. West, The Devil's Advocate

“If prayer fails I am in a greater darkness yet, not knowing whether I have presumed too much or believed too little.”
― Morris L. West, The Devil's Advocate

“Even in sin, the act of love -done with love- is shadowed with divinity. Its conformity may be at fault, but its nature is not altered, and its nature is creative, communicative, splendid in surrender. It was in the splendor of my surrender to Nina and she to me, that I first understood how a man might surrender himself to God -if a God existed. The moment of love is a moment of union -of body and spirit- and the act of faith is mutual and implicit.”
― Morris L. West, The Devil's Advocate

“We are ants on the carcass of the world, spawned out of nothing, going busily nowhere. One of us dies, the others crawl over us to the pickings.”
― Morris L. West, The Devil's Advocate

“The man who does good in doubt must have so much more merit than one who does it in the bright certainty of belief. "Other sheep I have which are not of this fold..." A warning against the smugness of inherited faith.”
― Morris L. West, The Devil's Advocate

“The truth ? the truth my dear Ashely is a luxury available only to those who are not involved in its consequences ”
― Morris West

“[The writer] has to be the kind of man who turns the world upside down and says, lookit, it looks different, doesn’t it?”
― Morris L. West

“Look at yourself! You're a priest. You know damn well that if I were setting out to make a girl at this moment instead of young Paolo, you'd take an entirely different view. You'd disapprove, sure! You'd read me a lecture on fornication and all the rest. But you wouldn't be too unhappy. I'd be normal... according to nature! But I am not made like that. God didn't make me like that. But do I need love the less? Do I need satisfaction less? Have I less right to live in contentment because somewhere along the line the Almighty slipped a cog in creation?... What's your answer to that Meredith? What's your answer for me? Tie a knot in myself and take up badminton and wait till they make me an angel in heaven, where they don't need this sort of thing any more? I'm lonely! I need love like the next man! My sort of love!”
― Morris L. West, The Devil's Advocate

“I believe in saints as I believe in sanctity. I believe in miracles as I believe in God, who can suspend the laws of His own making. But I believe, too, that the hand of God writes plainly and simply, for all men of good will to read. I am doubtful of His presence in confusion and conflicting voices.”
― Morris L. West, The Devil's Advocate

“If you spend your life waiting for the sun, you'll never enjoy the storm.”
― Morris West

“I know what you are thinking - you need a sign. What better one could I give than to make this little one whole and new? I could do it, but I will not. I am the Lord and not a conjurer. I gave this mite a gift I denied to all of you - eternal innocence.
To you, he looks imperfect but to me he is flawless like the bud that dies unopened or the fledgling that falls from the nest
to be devoured by the ants. He will never offend me, as all of you have done. He will never pervert or destroy the work of my Father's hands. He is necessary to you. He will evoke the kindness that will keep you human. His infirmity will prompt you to gratitude for your own good fortune. More! He will remind you every day that I am who I am, that my ways are not yours, and that the smallest dust mite, while in darkest space, does not fall out of my hand. I have chosen you. You have not chosen me. This little one is my sign to you. Treasure him!”
― Morris West, The Clowns of God

“One solved nothing by waving the commandments like a bludgeon at people's heads. There was no point in shouting damnation at a man who was already walking himself to hell on his own two feet. One had to pray for the Grace of God and then go probing like a good psychologist for the fear that might condition him to repentance or the love that might draw him toward it.”
― Morris L. West, The Devil's Advocate

“I can't tell you why God made you the way you are any more than I can tell you why he's planted a carcinoma in my stomach to make me die painfully while other men die peacefully in their sleep. The cogs of creation seem to slip all the time. Babies are born with two heads, mothers of families run crazy with carving knives, men die in plague, famine and thunderstorms. Why? Only God knows.”
― Morris L. West, The Devil's Advocate

“You are not born to peace, my friend. This is the first thing you must accept. You will not come to it, perhaps, till the day you die. Each of us has his own cross, you know, made and fitted to his reluctant shoulders.”
― Morris West , The Shoes of the Fisherman: 1

“Other priests, he knew, found an intense pleasure in the raw, salty dialect of peasant conversation. They picked up pearls of wisdom and experience over a farmhouse table or a cup of wine in a workingman's kitchen. They talked with equal familiarity to the rough-tongued whores of Trastevere and the polished signori of Parioli. They enjoyed the ribald humor of the fish market as much as the wit of a Cardinal's dinner table. They were good priests too, and they did much good for their people, with a singular satisfaction to themselves.”
― Morris L. West, The Devil's Advocate

“Who cares about theology except the theologians? We are necessary, but less important than we think. The Church is Christ—Christ and the people. And all the people want to know is whether or not there is a God, and what is His relation with them, and how they can get back to Him when they stray.”
― Morris L. West, The Shoes of the Fisherman

“alegría es un don que se acepta con agradecimiento y sin intentar pagarlo, así como no se intenta pagar la luz del sol ni el canto de los pájaros.”
― Morris L. West, Las sandalias del pescador

“I don't like making pacts with tomorrow. I want today—just as it is, good and bad. I feel safe that way. I don't want to face the great perhaps.”
― Morris L. West, Daughter of Silence

“Perhaps that is part of the meaning of pain – that it challenges our arrogant possession of life; that it confronts us with our own frailty and makes us aware, however dimly, of the sustaining power of the Creator.”
― Morris L. West, The Shoes of the Fisherman

“There is no passion in your life, my son. You have never loved a woman, nor hated a man, nor pitied a child. You have withdrawn yourself too long and you are a stranger in the human family. You have asked nothing and given nothing. You have never known the dignity of need nor gratitude for a suffering shared. This is your sickness. This is the cross you have fashioned for your own shoulders. This is where your doubts begin and your fears too – because a man who cannot love his fellows cannot love God either.”
― Morris L. West, The Devil's Advocate

“Look at him by scale and proportion and you find him on the one hand a minuscule dwarf, in a universe without apparent limits. Measure him by another scale and you find in partial control of the enormity in which he lives…”
― Morris L. West, The Shoes of the Fisherman