The Long Loneliness Quotes

“We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.”
― Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist – A Greenwich Village Journalist's Conversion and Commitment to Peace and Justice

“It is people who are important, not the masses.”
― Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist – A Greenwich Village Journalist's Conversion and Commitment to Peace and Justice

“We cannot love God unless we love each other, and to love we must know each other. We know Him in the breaking of bread, and we know each other in the breaking of bread, and we are not alone anymore. Heaven is a banquet and life is a banquet, too, even with a crust, where there is companionship.”
― Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist – A Greenwich Village Journalist's Conversion and Commitment to Peace and Justice

“I felt that the Church was the Church of the poor,... but at the same time, I felt that it did not set its face against a social order which made so much charity in the present sense of the word necessary. I felt that charity was a word to choke over. Who wanted charity? And it was not just human pride but a strong sense of man's dignity and worth, and what was due to him in justice, that made me resent, rather than feel pround of so mighty a sum total of Catholic institutions.”
― Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist – A Greenwich Village Journalist's Conversion and Commitment to Peace and Justice

“Once a priest told us that no one gets up in the pulpit without promulgating a heresy. He was joking, of course, but what I suppose he meant was the truth was so pure, so holy, that it was hard to emphasize one aspect of the truth without underestimating another, that we did not see things as a whole, but through a glass darkly, as St. Paul said.”
― Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist – A Greenwich Village Journalist's Conversion and Commitment to Peace and Justice

“I felt, even at fifteen, that God meant man to be happy, that He meant to provide him with what he needed to maintain life in order to be happy, and that we did not need to have quite so much destruction and misery as I saw all around and read of in the daily press.”
― Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist – A Greenwich Village Journalist's Conversion and Commitment to Peace and Justice

“I was lonely, deadly lonely. And I was to find out then, as I found out so many times, over and over again, that women especially are social beings, who are not content with just husband and family, but must have a community, a group, an exchange with others. Young and old, even in the busiest years of our lives, we women especially are victims of the long loneliness.

It was years before I woke up without that longing for a face pressed against my breast, an arm about my shoulder. The sense of loss was there.

I never was so unhappy, never felt so great the sense of loneliness. No matter how many times I gave up mother, father, husband, brother, daughter, for His sake, I had to do it over again.

Tamar is partly responsible for the title of this book in that when I was beginning it she was writing me about how alone a mother of young children always is. I had also just heard from an old woman who lived a long and full life, and she too spoke of her loneliness”
― Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist – A Greenwich Village Journalist's Conversion and Commitment to Peace and Justice

“There was no attack on religion because people were generally indifferent to religion. They were neither hot nor cold. They were the tepid, the materialistic, who hoped that by Sunday churchgoing they would be taking care of the afterlife, if there were an afterlife. Meanwhile they would get everything they could in this.”
― Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist – A Greenwich Village Journalist's Conversion and Commitment to Peace and Justice

“For to Ade,...the holy man was the whole mad, the man of integrity, who not only tried to change the world, but to live in it as it was.”
― Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist – A Greenwich Village Journalist's Conversion and Commitment to Peace and Justice

“There had been that young Catholic girl in the bed next to me at the hospital who gave me a medal of St. Thérèse of Lisieux. “I don’t believe in these things,” I told her, and it was another example of people saying what they do not mean. “If you love someone you like to have something around which reminds you of them,” she told me.”
― Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist – A Greenwich Village Journalist's Conversion and Commitment to Peace and Justice

“Every one of us who was attracted to the poor had a sense of guilt, of responsibility, a feeling that in some way we were living on the labor of others. The fact that we were born in a certain environment, were enabled to go to school, were endowed with the ability to compete with others and hold our own, that we had few physical disabilities—all these things marked us as the privileged in a way.”
― Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of Dorothy Day

“People have so great a need to reverence, to worship, to adore; it is a psychological necessity of human nature that must be taken into account.”
― Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist – A Greenwich Village Journalist's Conversion and Commitment to Peace and Justice

“Christian philosophy of work was this. God is our creator. God made us in His image and likeness. Therefore we are creators. He gave us a garden to till and cultivate. We become co-creators by our responsible acts, whether in bringing forth children, or producing food, furniture or clothing. The joy of creativeness should be ours.”
― Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of Dorothy Day

“Love is a commandment, Father Hugo said. It is a choice, a preference. If we love God with our whole hearts, how much heart have we left? If we love with our whole mind and soul and strength, how much mind and soul and strength have we left? We must live this life now. Death changes nothing. If we do not learn to enjoy God now we never will. If we do not learn to praise Him and thank Him and rejoice in Him now, we never will.”
― Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist – A Greenwich Village Journalist's Conversion and Commitment to Peace and Justice

“The final object of this love and gratitude was God. No human creature could receive or contain so vast a flood of love and joy as I often felt after the birth of my child.”
― Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist – A Greenwich Village Journalist's Conversion and Commitment to Peace and Justice

“But the final word is love. At times it has been, in the words of Father Zossima, a harsh and dreadful thing, and our very faith in love has been tried through fire.
We cannot love God unless we love each other, and to love we must know each other. We know Him in the breaking of bread, and we know each other in the breaking of bread, and we are not alone any more. Heaven is a banquet and life is a banquet, too, even with a crust, where there is companionship.
We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.
It all happened while we sat there talking, and it is still going on.”
― Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist – A Greenwich Village Journalist's Conversion and Commitment to Peace and Justice

“In spite of the conflicts in the radical movement much was gained by this constant agitation. Evictions were halted, relief came, playgrounds were built, slum houses were torn down, and conditions have somewhat improved.”
― Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist – A Greenwich Village Journalist's Conversion and Commitment to Peace and Justice

“When I think of the human suffering, the terrible amount of energy needed to move even infinitesimally toward a more decent life I am amazed at human patience.”
― Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist – A Greenwich Village Journalist's Conversion and Commitment to Peace and Justice

“In one such church in Wilmington, Delaware, the police broke up the meeting by throwing tear-gas bombs through the windows and when the marchers broke out from the church in disorderly fashion, clubbed and arrested those whom they suspected of being the leaders.”
― Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist – A Greenwich Village Journalist's Conversion and Commitment to Peace and Justice

“We must live this life now. Death changes nothing. If we do not learn to enjoy God now we never will. If we do not learn to praise Him and thank Him and rejoice in Him now, we never will.”
― Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist – A Greenwich Village Journalist's Conversion and Commitment to Peace and Justice

“Without faith it is impossible to please God.” Faith that works through love is the mark of the supernatural life. God always gives us a chance to show our preference for Him. With Abraham it was to sacrifice his only son. With me it was to give up my married life with Forster. You do these things blindly, not because it is your natural inclination—you are going against nature when you do them—but because you wish to live in conformity with the will of God.”
― Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist – A Greenwich Village Journalist's Conversion and Commitment to Peace and Justice

“They didn’t want to make the retreat because they lived a retreat—they were superior. But they ended up by coming at midnight, after imbibing at a few taverns along the way, but the important thing is that they came. There is a Bohemianism of the religious life among young people as well as Bohemianism in the labor movement, and it too smacks of sentimentality. The gesture of being dirty because the outcast is dirty, of drinking because he drinks, of staying up all night and talking, because that is what one’s guests from the streets want to do, in participating in his sin from a prideful humility, this is self-deception indeed!”
― Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist – A Greenwich Village Journalist's Conversion and Commitment to Peace and Justice

“Being a mother is fulfillment, it is surrender to others, it is Love and therefore of course it is suffering.”
― Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist – A Greenwich Village Journalist's Conversion and Commitment to Peace and Justice

“They did not want mass action, or violence. They were lambs in the simplicity of their program. They wanted to see the grass spring up between the cobbles of the city streets. They wanted to see the workers leave the cities with their wives and children and take to the fields, build themselves homes, where they would have room to breathe, to study, to pray, where there would be work for all.”
― Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist – A Greenwich Village Journalist's Conversion and Commitment to Peace and Justice

“Peter rejoiced to see men do great things and dream great dreams. He wanted them to stretch out their arms to their brothers, because he knew that the surest way to find God, to find the good, was through one’s brothers. Peter wanted this striving to result in a better physical life in which all men would be able to fulfill themselves, develop their capacities for love and worship, expressed in all the arts. He wanted them to be able to produce what was needed in the way of homes, food, clothing, so that there was enough of these necessities for everyone. A synthesis of “cult, culture and cultivation,” he called it, as he tried to give me the long view, the vision.”
― Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist – A Greenwich Village Journalist's Conversion and Commitment to Peace and Justice

“was lonely, deadly lonely. And I was to find out then, as I found out so many times, over and over again, that women especially are social beings, who are not content with just husband and family, but must have a community, a group, an exchange with others. A child is not enough. A husband and children, no matter how busy one may be kept by them, are not enough. Young and old, even in the busiest years of our lives, we women especially are victims of the long loneliness. Men may go away and become desert Fathers, but there were no desert mothers. Even the anchoresses led rather sociable lives, with bookbinding and spiritual counseling, even if they did have to stay in one place.”
― Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist – A Greenwich Village Journalist's Conversion and Commitment to Peace and Justice

“I had bought a small phonograph for a dollar down and a dollar a week, plunging at once into installment buying, that plague of the poor, that dishonesty by which the poor are robbed of their meager earnings.”
― Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist – A Greenwich Village Journalist's Conversion and Commitment to Peace and Justice

“Kropotkin wanted much the same type of social order as Eric Gill, the artist, Father Vincent McNabb, the Dominican street preacher, G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc and other distributists advocated, though they would have revolted at the word anarchist, thinking it synonymous with chaos, not “self-government” as Proudhon defined it. Distributism is the English term for that society whereby man has sufficient of this world’s goods to enable him to lead a good life. Other words have been used to describe this theory, mutualism, federalism, pluralism, regionalism; but anarchism—the word, first used as a taunt by its Marxist opponents, best brings to mind the tension always existing between the concept of authority and freedom which torments man to this day.”
― Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist – A Greenwich Village Journalist's Conversion and Commitment to Peace and Justice

“When I die, I hope people will say that I tried to be mindful of what Jesus told us—His wonderful stories—and I tried my best to live up to His example (we fall flat on our faces all the time, though!) and I tried to take those artists and novelists to heart, and live up to their wisdom (a lot of it came from Jesus, as you [students] probably know, because Dickens and Dostoevski and Tolstoi kept thinking of Jesus themselves all through their lives).”
― Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist – A Greenwich Village Journalist's Conversion and Commitment to Peace and Justice

“For Christ Himself, housed in the tabernacles in the Church no magnificence is too great, but for the priest who serves Christ, and for the priesthood of the laity, no such magnificence, in the face of the hunger and homelessness of the world, can be understood.”
― Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist – A Greenwich Village Journalist's Conversion and Commitment to Peace and Justice