The Monk Downstairs Quotes

“We are born to love as we are born to die, and between the heartbeats of those two great mysteries lies all the tangled undergrowth of our tiny lives. There is nowhere to go but through. And so we walk on, lost, and lost again, in the mapless wilderness of love.”
― Tim Farrington, The Monk Downstairs

“We expect God’s presence to be thunderous, spectacular, monumental; but it is our need that is so large. The real presence slips past our demands for spectacle. It slips past our despair.”
― Tim Farrington, The Monk Downstairs

“Today she wore a navy blue suit that deftly minimized a slight tendency to heft.”
― Tim Farrington, The Monk Downstairs

“...he smelled like somebody trying to smell like somebody else.”
― Tim Farrington, The Monk Downstairs

“ Put your other goddamned sock on", she said.
Instead, he took the first sock off. They stared at each other. It was so spectacularly absurd. She could feel the corner of her mouth twitching; she was close to laughing. Rory had used to do the same sort of thing; she'd spent a decade of her life being mollified by simple existential charm. ”
― Tim Farrington, The Monk Downstairs

“She loved her daughter, the blessing of a good book, a glass of wine after the day’s wave of vanity had passed.”
― Tim Farrington, The Monk Downstairs

“She had a fleeting sense of his God out there somewhere, like the sea itself, invisible and dangerous, a vastness wrapped in darkness, just a long fall away.”
― Tim Farrington, The Monk Downstairs

“But deep prayer, prolonged prayer, is a terrible mirror—kneel there long enough and everything shows. There’s no way out of eventually seeing your phoniness and dishonesty.”
― Tim Farrington, The Monk Downstairs

“ For the rest of the afternoon, Rebecca wandered around the house tidying up halfheartedly, feeling bereft and disoriented, trying to balance impassive mass of all the ordinary things of her life with her sense that everything had changed. Inevitably, the weightless moments with Mike began to seem unreal. All her furniture said that love was a bubble and a fluke. ”
― Tim Farrington, The Monk Downstairs

“ There didn't seem to be that much to say. If you loved Phoebe now, it was going to hurt you to see her. Like facing cold water, you just jumped in and swam anyway. ”
― Tim Farrington, The Monk Downstairs

“Maybe this was why monks embraced such fathomless silence: they’d glimpsed how deep grief really was and understood that to grieve properly they had to sink from sight. They’d discovered the love that lived at the bottom of grief, the love you couldn’t bring to the surface because the daylight and the bright air and the business of everyday life twisted it into something unrecognizable, something that inevitably seemed crude. She had never allowed herself to grieve wholly before, she realized now. Not”
― Tim Farrington, The Monk Downstairs

“I’ve got a wonderful, pathetic little life that is precious to me.”
― Tim Farrington, The Monk Downstairs

“All she really wanted was to protect her daughter's joy in unicorns. It was like loving a soap bubble, she knew, treasuring that innocence. Yet nothing else in her life right now moved her in the least. She often thought that must be a little pathetic; surely she should have found a larger cause by now. But the larger causes of her youth had bled away. Her sense of the Big Picture had fractured and decayed. She loved her daughter, the blessing of a good book, a glass of wine after the day's wave of vanity had passed.”
― Tim Farrington, The Monk Downstairs

“Real prayer is a disappearance, a surrender to the embrace of deepening mystery, in darkness. In that darkness, finally, God alone is. And God is infinite surprise.”
― Tim Farrington, The Monk Downstairs

“God is the nail that splits our palm to break our grip on the world.”
― Tim Farrington, The Monk Downstairs