The Father's Tale Quotes

“Happy Christmas" was their version of "Merry Christmas," and a better version, it seemed to him, for making merry was different from making happiness.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, The Father's Tale

“Yet he saw that in all places there was originality, resulting from the human efforts at decoration and ingenious methods of survival.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, The Father's Tale

“Human relationships were so complicated and always veering in the direction of the irrational.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, The Father's Tale

“Emotions, he was certain, were unreliable and irrelevant to the labor of religious faith.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, The Father's Tale

“That kiss was worth a thousand fornications.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, The Father's Tale

“switched it off. He fell asleep holding Pin’s kingfisher in his hand.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, The Father's Tale

“Though the fear of what was coming returned to him a little, he looked upward to a presence and spoke with it and listened to the answering silence. He knew now that this silence was not absence or negation. It was the language transcending all language, and it crossed the void that man’s will had made between himself and God.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, The Father's Tale

“You are a brother”, said Pin. “That is important enough. Does not Saint Thomas Aquinas teach that one human soul, any human soul, is worth more than the entire value of the material universe?”
― Michael D. O'Brien, The Father's Tale

“That is where you are wrong, Mr. Zhang. Did you not know that our loss of celestial language is the result of our loss of celestial silence?”
― Michael D. O'Brien, The Father's Tale

“Three generations of Communism had come close to obliterating the concept of Sabbath rest. Though it lingered in other forms, stripped of the sacred, its role as a major signpost pounded into the ground of history had largely disappeared. It no longer pointed to the transience of man’s estate, nor to the Resurrection, nor to eternal destinations. Thus, the days rolled into one another without much difference.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, The Father's Tale

“He concluded that at worst, his heart was still rooted in selfish desire; at best, he was seeking not so much a specific person as love itself.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, The Father's Tale

“But I saw a lot as I was growing up. I learned that whenever a person refuses to live according to moral laws, love cannot survive.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, The Father's Tale

“The dragon. Just when you think he’s getting smaller and smaller, no bigger than a lapdog, he opens his little mouth and swallows the whole world in one gulp.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, The Father's Tale

“word once spoken cannot be taken back”, she went on with quiet intensity. “It goes out into the world. It changes the world. You must take greater care with your words.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, The Father's Tale

“The author left no doubt as to whom he blamed for Russia’s current troubles: the Godless state. Borisov contended that a people could die without actually being physically annihilated. In other words, its true genius and its providential role in history could be lost by removal of its memory. Into the resulting vacuum, he warned, would pour catastrophic aberrations. Alex was stalled at a passage that echoed a comment of Father Sergius’, one that he had paid little attention to at the time. What you fail to realize is that our situation in Russia can go either way—to God or to Satan, to Holy Russia or to Gog and Magog.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, The Father's Tale

“There is only one antidote—to find again the Bridegroom and beg His forgiveness. He will forgive. He is love, and He is truth. He will forgive everything.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, The Father's Tale

“I mean the breaking of continuity. When you lose your place in the stream of time, you become a person who is completely dependent on the social.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, The Father's Tale

“Two fundamental gifts of God have been corrupted: the light of reason in the West, the fire of authentic spirituality in the East.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, The Father's Tale

“Russia is a bride who rejected her bridegroom in the interests of becoming a free woman and became instead the worst of prostitutes—she now kills her customers and her children indiscriminately.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, The Father's Tale

“We grow angry at our suffering; we resent and complain and make others pay for our unhappiness.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, The Father's Tale

“of becoming a desert dweller. Like Serafim, I had suffered on the cross with Christ, but unlike him, I had not yet given everything. You see, Aleksandr, in each heart three trees grow. Life cuts them down, trims them, crafts them into crosses. Then they are lifted high on a hill—a hill like a skull. One is the cross of Jesus, the second the cross of the repentant thief, and the third the cross of the unrepentant thief.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, The Father's Tale

“The desert is a place of desolation”, the priest said. “But there are hidden springs in it. In the desert one must learn to stand still, to wait for God in emptiness. Standing still in this way is a purifying fire. One must not run from it, for it is a great gift.” “A gift?” “Is it difficult for you to grasp, Aleksandr? I suppose it must be. May I tell you a story?”
― Michael D. O'Brien, The Father's Tale

“Freedom of the heart has a price, Aleksandr”, Father Serafim continued in an unhurried tone. “To face the darkness within oneself is part of it.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, The Father's Tale

“Father Serafim went on: “A man leaves the safe haven of his familiar world. And even if his home be a difficult place, even though it be a place of slavery, he experiences it as his own. It is knowable, the dangers identifiable. In the desert all certainties fall away. He feels his weakness as never before. There are joys and consolations, but during the periods when these withdraw and desolations take their place, he feels more helpless than ever. He asks himself, ‘Is there truly a Promised Land? And if there is a Promised Land, will I ever find it? And if I do find it, am I fit to live in such a glorious country? No, I am not fit in any way’, he says to himself.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, The Father's Tale

“Unless one throws away all weapons, all armor, he cannot learn meekness.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, The Father's Tale

“Joy and sorrow—and especially the areas of your life where there is weakness?”
― Michael D. O'Brien, The Father's Tale

“What is failure? The only failure is to reject what God wishes to show us. You experienced many things, did you not?”
― Michael D. O'Brien, The Father's Tale

“He mused on the power of fear, saw its insidious and corrosive qualities, saw as well how extensive had been its control over him. He began to pray. The prayer took the form of stillness, of attention before the presence that was everywhere, that had created it all and loved it all. He did not feel the slightest desire to assess this new awareness, to articulate and categorize it, to store it in the architecture of his mind. Nor was there any need to manufacture words to say to God. By the same token, he did not think that God should deliver a message to him. If God was silent, he had good reason to be. If God did not speak, maybe it was because he, Alex, was not yet ready to hear, and premature speech would have made him more incapable of hearing.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, The Father's Tale

“Charity does not batter down the gates of a wall in the name of love or in the name of a unity that does not yet exist.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, The Father's Tale

“Father Sergius nodded. “Yes, but not as a pious form of life that one puts on like an overcoat. Rather, he lives this mystery without thinking about it. It is not something he does; it is something he is.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, The Father's Tale