Dorothy Day

“The legal battle against segregation is won, but the community battle goes on.”

“Love casts out fear, but we have to get over the fear in order to get close enough to love them.”

“Don't worry about being effective. Just concentrate on being faithful to the truth.”

“The vanity of Eve, that desire to exercise power, to seduce, to drag down!”

“Those who cannot see Christ in the poor are atheists indeed.”

“I don't think God is so jealous about our worship of Him that He will want to separate those who serve His purposes, serve His goodness, because they have read a book, even one written by an atheist, and have been moved, or because they have wanted to be fair all their lives, but have never stepped in a church, from those who have heard God's words in church or read His words in the Bible and become convinced by them.”

“My soul hath thirsted after the strong living God; when shall I come and appear before the face of God?' (Psalm 42:2) But the Psalmist also says, 'In death there is no one that is mindful of thee.' So it made me happy that I could be with my mother the last few weeks of her life, and for the last ten days at her bedside daily and hourly. Sometimes I thought to myself that it was like being present at a birth to sit by a dying person and see their intentness on what is happening to them. It almost seems that one is absorbed in a struggle, a fearful, grim, physical struggle, to breathe, to swallow, to live. And so, I kept thinking to myself, how necessary it is for one of their loved ones to be beside them, to pray for them, to offer up prayers for them unceasingly, as well as to do all those little offices one can. When my daughter was a little tiny girl, she said to me once, 'When I get to be a great big woman and you are a little tiny girl, I'll take care of you,' and I thought of that when I had to feed my mother by the spoonful and urge her to eat her custard. How good God was to me, to let me be there. I had prayed so constantly that I would be beside her when she died; for years I had offered up that prayer. And God granted it quite literally. I was there, holding her hand, and she just turned her head and sighed.”

“Don't call me a saint. I don't want to be dismissed so easily.”

“As Dostoevski said: 'Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams.”

“The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us?”

“Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system.”

“Women think with their whole bodies and they see things as a whole more than men do.”

“We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.”

“We cannot build up the idea of the apostolate of the laity without the foundation of the liturgy.”

“I have long since come to believe that people never mean half of what they say, and that it is best to disregard their talk and judge only their actions.”

“We believe in loving our brothers regardless of race, color or creed and we believe in showing this love by working for better conditions immediately and the ultimate owning by the workers of their means of production.”

“I firmly believe that our salvation depends on the poor.”

“As for ourselves, yes, we must be meek, bear injustice, malice, rash judgment. We must turn the other cheek, give up our cloak, go a second mile.”

“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”

“Food for the body is not enough. There must be food for the soul.”