A Patchwork Of Moonlight And Shadow Quotes

“Silence, I found, and still find now, is the hardest thing on sadness. In silence sadness blossoms, where in talk it closes in upon itself as the flower closes at dusk.”
― T.M Cicinski, A Patchwork Of Moonlight And Shadow

“In this world, as you well know,” the priest responded, “to turn the other cheek is to become a slave. God himself never turned the other cheek. He met insult, or threat, with fire and brimstone. Since man is made in his image, no man can turn the other cheek without being poisoned either by thoughts of vengeance, or by a feeling of his own cowardliness and weakness, for the rest of his life. When injured, a man must take action in one form or another, or he is not worthy of calling himself a son of God.”
― T.M Cicinski, A Patchwork Of Moonlight And Shadow

“That quality, he told me, is the rarest of all – the quality of a person who thinks, without prejudice or motivation other than simply a desire to understand the world.”
― T.M Cicinski, A Patchwork Of Moonlight And Shadow

“There is a great difference between having life without living and being dead. For my part, I think most people would desire the former, if forced to choose.”
― T.M Cicinski, A Patchwork Of Moonlight And Shadow

“To me it has always seemed that those who do not act are dead too, though it is not always plain to see from the outside. It is in acting that we live, moment by moment. To exist without conscious choices, without action, is rather like not living at all.”
― T.M Cicinski, A Patchwork Of Moonlight And Shadow

“When you have nothing, a lack of freedom means little. But when you have the world, a lack of freedom means everything.”
― T.M Cicinski, A Patchwork Of Moonlight And Shadow

“What is a loss of freedom when you have everything else?”
― T.M Cicinski, A Patchwork Of Moonlight And Shadow

“One cannot change the type of friend one has been in the past – only in the present and the future.”
― T.M Cicinski, A Patchwork Of Moonlight And Shadow

“Men say foolish things. If we always did what men say, our lives would be hard and short.”
― T.M Cicinski, A Patchwork Of Moonlight And Shadow

“How much freedom do dead men enjoy?”
― T.M Cicinski, A Patchwork Of Moonlight And Shadow

“A slave turns the other cheek because he must,” he said, “but a free man has a duty to do what he can to make the world better. If not, why should he have freedom?”
― T.M Cicinski, A Patchwork Of Moonlight And Shadow

“His fate was not in his own hands, it seemed to him. And it was not until much later that he came to realise that the reason it was not in his own hands was because, quite simply, he had never thought to grasp it and hold on. No-one had ever told him that he could.”
― T.M Cicinski, A Patchwork Of Moonlight And Shadow

“Understanding why you did a thing, he had heard it said many times, did not make it easier to do it. If anything the opposite was true.”
― T.M Cicinski, A Patchwork Of Moonlight And Shadow

“When a man is about to die, it is would be a great sin, would it not, to waste what time he has left to him.”
― T.M Cicinski, A Patchwork Of Moonlight And Shadow

“Happy memories are the best shields against unhappy days.”
― T.M Cicinski, A Patchwork Of Moonlight And Shadow

“There is always pressure to do bad things... But a good person cannot be pressured into being a bad person, only into acting in a bad.”
― T.M Cicinski, A Patchwork Of Moonlight And Shadow

“How can you tell which are wicked and which are not?” I asked.
“By what they do,” my grandfather said.”
― T.M Cicinski, A Patchwork Of Moonlight And Shadow

“It matters not what a man was yesterday,” my grandfather told me, still speaking in a low voice. “It matters only what he is today and what he will be tomorrow.”
― T.M Cicinski, A Patchwork Of Moonlight And Shadow

“A person who makes something so beautiful out of something which was once so ugly, is usually a very good person in their heart, if not on the surface.”
― T.M Cicinski, A Patchwork Of Moonlight And Shadow

“To move a mountain, you must begin by picking up a single stone and carrying it to another place.”
― T.M Cicinski, A Patchwork Of Moonlight And Shadow

“Life is a gift… A humble man does not throw the gifts he receives into the gutter, whether he is pleased with them or not.”
― T.M Cicinski, A Patchwork Of Moonlight And Shadow

“Silence, in some cases,” the old man said, “is the same as acquiescence. To do nothing is to condone.”
“To condone, yet live...”
“Yes, but the person who has condoned something unjust cannot then complain that the world is unjust. They make it so.”
― T.M Cicinski, A Patchwork Of Moonlight And Shadow

“Perhaps it is better to forget your dreams than to remember your nightmares.”
― T.M Cicinski, A Patchwork Of Moonlight And Shadow

“Many of those moments which come to define our lives, we are left to imagine, since we were never there to experience them.”
― T.M Cicinski, A Patchwork Of Moonlight And Shadow