Reclaiming Quiet Quotes

“We are asked to shape our lives, our time, our attention by habits and rhythms radically different from the windblown fury of the broken world. This means an entirely alternate shape of life, not just the subtraction of screens and distractions but the embrace of prayer, of daily wonder, of listening, of trust, of celebration that roots us moment by moment in that deep, watchful quiet that ushers us into the presence of God.”
― Sarah Clarkson, Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention

“What if I couldn't do anything I wanted? What if love for my child, health for my body, or care for my neighbor meant a boundary to what I could desire? Would that mean a Nietzschean descent into the despair of a self unrealized, or was there a different way to understand the significance of a life poured out in small, generous, faithful acts?”
― Sarah Clarkson, Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention

“Whatever power I possessed was yielded to this child, willingly. With a whole of my being, I served her. The full possession of myself – my body, my time, my creativity, my hopes for the future – were things I did not think twice about offering to my child, and this was no means of manipulation. This was gift. Self poured out for the other. This was limit. I could not be any other. And it was one of the best things I had ever experienced.”
― Sarah Clarkson, Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention

“We are called to be a listening people. How can we be otherwise? In the beginning, before the tumult and song of history, before the spattered centuries of grieved desire and pain, before all the cries for love and justice unsettled the air and the world tumbled and twisted in a cacophony of anguished, ecstatic words, there was one radiant Word so beautiful it shattered the ancient and unformed darkness. This Word of God named and narrated us alive, spoke our battered, beautiful cosmos into being, and when it began it was wholly good.”
― Sarah Clarkson, Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention

“draw us to the hearthside of your presence. Send silence to halt our frenzied ways and quiet to lead us homeward to where your love has laid a feast. Help us to recall the grace in which we already stand, the love that need never be asked for because it is already given, the home that has already been made in our hearts by your Spirit and waits for our weary arrival.”
― Sarah Clarkson, Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention

“This small habit, to say my prayers before I look at my phone, seems both tiny and mighty, a small thing to do and to work sometimes laughably beyond my grasp.”
― Sarah Clarkson, Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention

“Quiet is not an abstract thing we can pull down from the air but the formation of habit and time, a claiming of physical shapes and daily spaces. Quiet is not an idea but a form we choose and staunchly inhabit.”
― Sarah Clarkson, Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention

“Humanity has never run short of ways to distract itself, but in the media age, distraction has become a way of life. I think the past years have seen an intensification of this engagement that threatens to destroy our capacity to relate to other people without suspicion, that sets us in a constant state of competition, that siphons away our sense of peace and bankrupts our capacity to accept anything at all as gift, or grace, or wonder.”
― Sarah Clarkson, Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention

“In this book, I want to explore what it looks like for an ordinary person to choose the radical way of quiet. To slow slowly (and often with great difficulty) choose the patterns and ways of hush rather than a hurry or information. To open days with prayer or a moment of stillness instead of a quick scroll on a screen. To turn, in grief or fear, to the inner refuge of God's presence rather than Google.”
― Sarah Clarkson, Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention

“I turned compulsively to my phone not only in moments of relaxation but also in anxiety. I began to wonder if at times my smartphone had become my replacement for the Holy Spirit, the ever-present comforter I turned to in times of fear.”
― Sarah Clarkson, Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention

“We enter quiet not just to hush our own voices but to hear his. And in the hearing, be saved.”
― Sarah Clarkson, Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention

“At the heart of our devastated silence is still that great Word speaking us back into life. He has never ceased to hover over the dark and unformed waters”
― Sarah Clarkson, Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention

“And with her warmth came a blessed slowness, the sense of things made not on the instant but with the kind of gentle, attentive movement that is a dance made to the teakettle and kitchen sink”
― Sarah Clarkson, Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention

“almost mythical, like little household goddesses: potent, symbolic shapes of hearthside comfort.”
― Sarah Clarkson, Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention

“An Aga can heat a whole house,”
― Sarah Clarkson, Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention

“The kitchen was my special refuge. It became the place of my homecoming to quiet.”
― Sarah Clarkson, Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention

“there ​is a physical shape, a rhythm to the cultivation of quiet.”
― Sarah Clarkson, Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention

“He was still there, gracious as my friend, fragrant as the coffee, tender as the autumn light, and in the revelatory brightness of those graces, I remembered afresh that his presence is constant, never dependent upon my discipline. He waits,”
― Sarah Clarkson, Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention

“into a sense of God’s companionship.”
― Sarah Clarkson, Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention

“to leave the furor of my screens and attend instead to the quiet spaces of that London home, to the East End streets”
― Sarah Clarkson, Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention

“my slow journey to an adult life and a faith that could contain both my illness and my hope.”
― Sarah Clarkson, Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention

“Those bitter years of hushed, hungry reading became the ground of my adult faith. I learned to truly expect God’s arrival”
― Sarah Clarkson, Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention

“But in that wasteland of my heart, I found the ancient, gracious quiet of my childhood still waiting.”
― Sarah Clarkson, Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention

“But quiet is not primarily a practice; it is a homeland,”
― Sarah Clarkson, Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention

“remember the way I could gather myself into myself, draw all my powers inward to some interior room where I could imagine or wonder, where I could rest.”
― Sarah Clarkson, Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention

“What if the life of prayer, the rootedness of quiet, was fueled not by discipline but by wonder?”
― Sarah Clarkson, Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention

“I learned to let prayer shape the way I saw the world, to "behold the lightener of the stars" as the Celtic Christians did in their ancient prayers, and to understand that the Creator's breath blew also in the dark and void places of my heart.”
― Sarah Clarkson, Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention

“I am a soul seeking to take part in the issues of my generation yet deeply convicted that I am called to cultivate a life shaped by the holy wild of quiet so that God's Word may sing amidst my days.”
― Sarah Clarkson, Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention

“...how to dwell in the kind of quiet that opens one up to the gift and wonder of the world.”
― Sarah Clarkson, Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention

“Quiet in this world; perhaps it is most often the vessel that bears us out of darkness and into hope.”
― Sarah Clarkson, Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention