Strangers and Sojourners Quotes

“[About the main character approaching death in old age, observed by her husband . . .] He saw that she had already laid down a large portion of her life long ago. Piece by piece she had given it away as she wrestled with existence, as her self was absorbed as nourishment into his life and the life of the children and the community. And laid down most piercingly, as she abandoned, one by one, the shapes of the dreams she had planned. Only to take them up again in other forms.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Strangers and Sojourners

“The only indestructible palace is in the heart.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Strangers and Sojourners

“Real love is a long apprenticeship.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Strangers and Sojourners

“You can't just sit there hating the wound, Tan, or indulging in bitterness. Whatever you become in life, always ask yourself, am I making more life or am I making more death?”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Strangers and Sojourners

“The world is full of hatred because it refuses to be poor. It wants to conquer fear with power. But you will conquer in another way, the unknown way. First, perhaps, you will forget. You will not see. You will not understand. Later you may see, and then you will know that the false self must die in order for the true self to be born.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Strangers and Sojourners

“I have always been beguiled by birds. As if there was much they would tell me if they could, but they are only permitted to bear witness with their lives, their song.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Strangers and Sojourners

“I am not afraid of being unloved. But I am terrified of never learning to love. There,”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Strangers and Sojourners

“In the absence of words he was free to absorb other meanings from between the hoofbeats, to find it in the bush rioting with warblers and robins, and caw of ravens, and the babble of water everywhere seeking liberation. These words had erupted from an immense stillness in creation, yet they spoke.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Strangers and Sojourners

“I didn’t know I was alone”, he said to the stone. “I didn’t know I was not alone until you came unto my aloneness. And I was no longer alone.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Strangers and Sojourners

“His life was occupied in this way, and with memory, which is the food we digest when life allows us to lie down.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Strangers and Sojourners

“Tis a wee visit we make t’this world”, said Turid L’Oraison.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Strangers and Sojourners

“It’s said that he loves best what’s little and truly is itself.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Strangers and Sojourners

“Admonition to myself: Anne, you will not deny in the dark what you have seen so clearly in the light!”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Strangers and Sojourners

“Nathaniel, be a father to your people. True fathers and mothers shall heal a ruined nation.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Strangers and Sojourners

“I will not turn away from life. I will love each mote of existence passionately.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Strangers and Sojourners

“She had discovered that all strengths would fail in the end and a beating heart exposed to eternity must come to understand its frailty. Only then could it begin to know its true dimensions, its simplicity and greatness. I have been a stone buried in deep earth, which is taken up and placed on a fence post in the sun.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Strangers and Sojourners

“They proposed everything under the sun except the only things that really count under the sun: they forgot about a boy and a girl walking through a field talking about the people they would beget in their flesh. They forgot about the poem. They forgot about old ladies who can flush out lies like a truffle-hunter. They forgot about children who play sailor. They forgot about the end of the world and the end of man, and in the forgetting they brought us a lot closer to the end of everything. That old woman, Anne, she told me this. She’ll read this some day and say she didn’t tell me it. But she did. I”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Strangers and Sojourners

“In the end the suicide was averted because the author was moved by something immovable in the other woman, the woman with the face. The woman called Anne.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Strangers and Sojourners

“It made me stronger. I gave everything, you see.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Strangers and Sojourners

“Yes. I was happy. But not with the kind of happiness most people want. It went much, much deeper. I can’t describe it. It was a sense that just grew and grew over the years, a current underneath everything, a feeling, a form, a hand that was on my life. A sort of fierce, fatherly love that demanded everything from me but hid itself from me. It had given everything. It wanted total trust in return.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Strangers and Sojourners

“All my life I’ve despised Jonah MacPhale”, said the old man. “But, you see, I was wrong. Each of us chooses one form of betrayal or another. Some betray people. Some betray the truth. We kill or steal or twist things up with a gun or a word, and all because we’re frightened little creatures. I can’t abandon Jonah to his fate. He is me, if you can understand, boy. And someone has to be there if his soul ever opens up long enough to ask why or cry out for help.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Strangers and Sojourners

“Under that fat belly and a half-million bucks in the bank is really just a little immigrant boy who’s scared of being poor or cold or alone.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Strangers and Sojourners

“This radio did not groan down on dying batteries but played and replayed the new cacophonous music with the pitiless dedication of monomaniacs.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Strangers and Sojourners

“for she recognized an affair with words as a symptom of profound unhappiness with the world.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Strangers and Sojourners

“Yes. It is. And I wouldn’t want any of the alternatives presently on the planet. But, Maurice, the seeds of tyranny are in every democracy. You mustn’t fool yourself. Anyone, any one of us can be seduced into trading away freedom to defend whatever we think the common good is at the time.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Strangers and Sojourners

“The Americans, with ourselves coming quickly up behind, are the most electrified, gadget-ridden, spoiled brats on the face of the earth, and you are insisting that hardworking, honest settlers are to be dispossessed of everything they have sweated and bled for so that a civilization utterly devoted to selfishness can compound its sickness? Rubbish!”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Strangers and Sojourners

“First-class land can be considered that which has good soil, adequate water supply, moderate climate, suitable elevation, and good location. Only 3 percent of Canadian land is considered to be truly first class.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Strangers and Sojourners

“dunno, Gram”, he muttered distractedly. She saw that his mind was drifting. Like so many of his generation, he was a creature of impressions, and each generation seemed a little worse in that regard, she thought.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Strangers and Sojourners

“They will be the losers. They have power and knowledge, but they are unable to love anything. Whether or not the world is really as your father imagines it to be, or as I’m convinced it is, we are agreed on one thing: such men will be the servants of destruction. Nothing good will ever come from them, no matter how high their motives may seem. If they have lost respect for even one small human life, or one small freedom, they will not long retain it for this humanity they profess to love so well.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Strangers and Sojourners

“Whatever you become in life, always ask yourself, am I making more life or am I making more death?”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Strangers and Sojourners