Stone Yard Devotional Quotes

“I used to think there was a 'before' and 'after' most things that happen to a person; that a fence of time and space could separate even quite catastrophic experience from the ordinary whole of life. But now I know that with a great devastation of some kind, there is no before or after. Even when the commotion of crisis has settled, it's still there, like that dam water, insisting, seeping, across the past and the future.”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“Our Simone once took me to task over my ‘sneering’ about prayer. My notion of prayer was juvenile: forget this telephone line to God bullshit, she snapped, hot with impatience. It wasn’t even about God, she said, which I thought must surely be blasphemous. Praying was a way to interrupt your own habitual thinking, she told me. It’s admitting yourself into otherness, cracking open your prejudices. It’s not chitchat; it’s hard labour. She spoke as if all this were obvious. I longed to understand her. It feels always that I am on the edge of some comprehension here but never breaking through to the other side.”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“But still, it has surprised me, over the years, to discover how many people find the idea of habitual kindness to be somehow suspect: a mask or a lie.”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“There may be a word in another language for what brought me to this place; to describe my particular kind of despair at that time. But I've never heard a word to express what I felt and what my body knew, which was that I had a need, an animal need, to find a place I had never been but which was still, in some undeniable way, my home.”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“I’m used to it now, the waiting. An incomplete, unhurried emergence of understanding, sitting with questions that are sometimes never answered.”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“It’s been my observation over many years that those who most powerfully resist convention quite peaceably accept the state of being reviled.”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“Nobody knows the subterranean lives of families.”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“We all make saints of the dead, I said. It's the only way we can bear it.”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“The beauty of being here is largely the silence, after all. Not having to explain, or endlessly converse.”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“We all make saints of the dead”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“There may be a word in another language for what brought me to this place; to describe my particular kind of despair at that time. But I’ve never heard a word to express what I felt and what my body knew, which was that I had a need, an animal need, to find a place I had never been but which was still, in some undeniable way, my home.”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“The silence is so thick it makes me feel wealthy.”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“But then, I reflect, there’s probably something sick about the way most people live.”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“In the hallway to the dining room hangs the famous Julian of Norwich quotation: All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. Nearby, in a little alcove, hangs something else – a boxed collection of pinned dead butterflies, orange and black, apparently a gift from some old priest of the area, long dead. I pass these two frames every day, but it happens sometimes here that one is suddenly struck anew by familiar things. During Vigils I am filled with mourning for those butterflies, for all the extinctions and threats, flooded once again with the knowledge that nothing outside these abbey walls is well, and no manner of things shall be well. And I know that inside these walls, Helen Parry is the only one who will face that truth. And I don’t know what my duty is to that knowledge, except to hold it.”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will…Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer. If we turn our mind towards the good, it is impossible that little by little the whole soul will not be attracted thereto in spite of itself.’ Simone Weil.”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“Throughout the hour of this emergency I had been absolutely calm. But the primitive body knows fear, and responds.”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“She smiles at me with what feels like her whole self, and I can only think of it as…love.”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“Action is the antidote to despair.’ Joan Baez.”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“And yet'. Those are my two favourite words, applicable to every situation, be it happy or bleak, 'The sun is rising? And yet it will set. A night of anguish? And yet it too, will pass.' Elie Wiesel”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“I wish, for the thousandth time that I had been older than I was when she fell ill. I feel sure more maturity would have brought with it some greater capacity to help her than I had.”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“It's been my observation over many years that those who most powerfully resist convention quite peaceably accept the state of being reviled.”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“I know that what happened to her at home, at school, and what she learned from that time about fighting and survival, is still inside her. And the world does owe her, is what I think.”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“Nobody knows the subterranean lives of families.”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“In the church”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“Praying was a way to interrupt your own habitual thinking”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“My mother said that anything that had once been alive should go back into the soil. Food scraps went into the compost, of course, including meant and bones, despite the general advice against this. Paper, torn into strips to allow air and microbes to move freely through. She would cut old pure cotton or silk or woollen clothes into small shreds and compost them too. Fish bones and flesh. Linen tea towels. She reluctantly left out larger pieces of wood, but longed for a woodchipper. She left cane furniture to rot and the buried it. She quoted a Buckingham Palace gardener she had once seen on television, who added leather boots to his compost bin. all that was needed was time, and nature. Anything that had lived could make itself useful, become nourishment in death, my mother said.

I never knew anyone else who had her reverence for the earth itself.”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will…Attention”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“I remembered Helen Parry coming down from the Stone Yard that day at the dam. It was Helen who found the place, who talked to Richard, who broke through the despair of inaction by showing us we could give permission to ourselves.”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“I asked my mother, near the end, if she was afraid of dying. She looked past me, through the window to the dogwood, and said in a quiet, even voice that she was ‘a bit nervous’. Later I would tell this story with pride in my mother’s stoicism and acceptance, her bravery, her strange faith (she said, another time, that she was looking forward to seeing my father, and her brother, wherever she was going; but she also said she did not believe in heaven or hell or an afterlife of any kind). Then I read in a novel these words: ‘ “Nervous” was Papa’s word for terror.”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“I asked my mother, near the end, if she was afraid of dying. She looked past me, through the window to the dogwood, and said in a quiet, even voice that she was ‘a bit nervous’. Later I would tell this story with pride in my mother’s stoicism and acceptance, her bravery, her strange faith (she said, another time, that she was looking forward to seeing my father, and her brother, wherever she was going; but she also said she did not believe in heaven or hell or an afterlife of any kind).”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional