Saint Quotes

“I want you to know that the idea of deserving something you want is only ever going to be an incomplete qualification. You’re far more likely to remember the reasons you shouldn’t have something you want than the reasons you should, and you’re far more likely to let shame steer you than joy.”
― Sierra Simone, Saint

“I want the memories to be worth the sins.”
― Sierra Simone, Saint

“No, most people don’t guess, do they? That sometimes the people who laugh the loudest and reach for life the hardest are the ones closest to darkness.”
― Sierra Simone, Saint

“The thing about falling in love is that by the time you realize it’s happened, it’s already too late.”
― Sierra Simone, Saint

“Memories aren’t meant to be torments, Brother Patrick,” Brother Connor says in a too-casual voice, the one that means he’s guessed what I’m thinking about. “They are gifts.”
― Sierra Simone, Saint

“You’re as intoxicating quiet as you are laughing. And you’re as beautiful serious as you are silly. And you are altogether more potent like this, more powerful, more stirring, and maybe it’s because silliness and contemplation are so much the same thing. Maybe it’s because no matter what you’re doing, you’re reminding me that I’m here and alive and that there’s more to living than work. That sometimes we can sleep in or play or pray and have nothing to show for it.”
― Sierra Simone, Saint

“Productivity is never the point, the outcome is never the point. The doing is the point.”
― Sierra Simone, Saint

“The path to God has become binary: you find God as a monastic or clergy, or you find God as a layperson. There is precious little in between. Oblation comes close but is still only one thread when there used to be an entire tapestry.”
― Sierra Simone, Saint

“Sometimes I want to think slowly. Sometimes I want the space to be wrong about something. Sometimes I just want quiet and the absence of . . . I don’t know. Production, I suppose. I want to have meandering thoughts and conversations and words that don’t go anywhere, that don’t always end up having a point.”
― Sierra Simone, Saint

“Sometimes our deepest happinesses start with regret.”
― Sierra Simone, Saint

“There is something wonderful about slow, languorous lovemaking, about tracing over someone’s body with loitering fingers and lips. The kind of sex that remits revelations which might sound infinitesimal to anyone else—the existence of a small scar, perhaps, or a few crisp hairs at the top of a foot—but that are life-changing in their discovery.”
― Sierra Simone, Saint

“That sometimes the people who laugh the loudest and reach for life the hardest are the ones closest to darkness.”
― Sierra Simone, Saint

“I knew he was still in love with you, but I thought it was in the way we always romanticize our pasts, you know? That it wasn’t you he was still in love with, but that version of himself and that time in his life.”
― Sierra Simone, Saint

“Franciscan friar Richard Rohr says that there are two kinds of time, at least according to the ancient Greeks. There is chronos—or chronological, ordered time—and then there is kairos. Kairos is subjective, qualitative. Deep Time is what Rohr calls it. A fullness, he says. The moments when the dots of our lives connect.”
― Sierra Simone, Saint

“You’ve made me want to be better because you are so smart and self-possessed, and when I’m with you, I want to eat up life with great big bites, I want to feed life to you until you’re full. There’s never been anyone like you, and all I’ve ever wanted was to give you everything.”
― Sierra Simone, Saint

“I love you like that. I love you like this. I love you like everything.”
― Sierra Simone, Saint

“I know God and I feel God more keenly and more deeply because of you.”
― Sierra Simone, Saint

“I find that fixed and unambiguous thinking is the mother of many sins. We forget that Christ was heterodox and radical. He was not safe, in his ideas or his passions or his presence, and he demanded everything of his followers, not the least their certainty that they knew all the shapes of right and wrong in their world. And so when I’m searching for a way forward, naively hunting for certainty, I’ve found that God judges me back to where God wants me. Which is in the middle of questions that feel unanswerable. I believe it is there - in the fire and friction of things I’ve been told don’t belong together, of things that I’ve been taught can’t be done - that the true answers lie.”
― Sierra Simone, Saint

“But regret is only part of the equation—an equation so long and so complicated that it will never stop being written as long as you’re alive. It is fruitless to reduce everything into a category of regret or un-regret—sometimes the best and most creative decisions we make will forever hold seeds of regret inside. Sometimes our deepest happinesses start with regret, growing over it the way a pearl grows over grit.”
― Sierra Simone, Saint

“About the answers. It’s because every time I leave, I have more questions.”
― Sierra Simone, Saint

“Paul the Apostle says that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.”
― Sierra Simone, Saint

“Until the air itself is hung with soft glimmers, until it feels like the world is hung with stars. It is so simple a thing—fireflies in the cloister. And yet every time, I’m humbled by it. By the magic God so casually lets loose for us, by these sweet moments which are so freely given.”
― Sierra Simone, Saint

“sometimes the best and most creative decisions we make will forever hold seeds of regret inside.”
― Sierra Simone, Saint

“What are a few what ifs when the rest of my life is set in stone?”
― Sierra Simone, Saint

“I don’t have to tell him that the Aiden from before never planned on living that long.”
― Sierra Simone, Saint

“Because I’d lived through so many years of it being in my mind, and when I stared out the window, I could see all the years of it yet to live through, and it was suddenly too exhausting to contemplate. It would never stop; it would never end. This would always be my life, and what was I even fighting for? The right to keep letting people down? The capacity to prey on their energy and patience until I’d bled them dry?”
― Sierra Simone, Saint

“It was like the smoke off an oil fire—silky and poisonous and thick; it wore my face; it spoke with my voice. “Hello,” it said. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
― Sierra Simone, Saint

“I could go to my mom and she would make it better. She'd make me not alone; she would make it go away. Maybe we all think that deep down, about our mothers, that they will make the monsters under our bed go away.”
― Sierra Simone, Saint

“Once upon a time there were as many ways to be holy as there were people, and the space between secular and monastic, between laity and clergy, was filled with all sorts of strange books and crannies. You could have visions, dream dreams, you could be monastic from the four walls of your own house or you could wander the country barefoot and begging. But we’ve lost much of that over the centuries.”
― Sierra Simone, Saint

“But is it possible that you love this life because it is the closest one you’ve found to the one you truly need?”
― Sierra Simone, Saint