Morris West

“If God be God and man a creature made in image of the divine intelligence, his noblest function is the search for truth.”

“I was lost a long time, without knowing it. Without the Faith, one is free, and that is a pleasant feeling at first. There are no questions of conscience, no constraints, except the constraints of custom, convention and the law, and these are flexible enough for most purposes. It is only later that terror comes. One is free - but free in chaos, in an unexplained and unexplainable world. One is free in a desert, from which there is no retreat but inward, toward the hollow core of oneself. There is nothing to build on but the small rock of one's own pride, and this is a nothing, based on nothing... I think, therefore I am. But what am I? An accident of disorder, going no place.”

“Each of us can walk only the path he sees at his own feet. Each of us is subject to the consequences of his own belief.”

“And I've always worked on the principle that if it interests me enough to write about it, then it must interest a lot of other people.”

“The fact is that the learning process goes on, and so long as the voices are not stilled and the singers go on singing some of it gets through.”

“Man is a creature who walks in two worlds and traces upon the walls of his cave the wonders and the nightmare experiences of his spiritual pilgrimage.”

“Once you accept the existence of God - however you define him, however you explain your relationship to him - then you are caught forever with his presence in the center of all things.”

“None of us is guaranteed against failure or corruption of any kind; witness what's going on in the world in this moment, the follies of human nature and the failures of human nature.”

“If you spend your whole life waiting for the storm, you'll never enjoy the sunshine.”

“The man who does good in doubt must have so much more merit than one who does it in the bright certainty of belief. "Other sheep I have which are not of this fold..." A warning against the smugness of inherited faith.”

“Well I travelled quite a lot in the east, and one of the things that impressed me greatly was the buddhist notion of the continuity of things, the wheel of life which is what we're talking about, the ever turning wheel.”

“I've always worked on the principle that if it interests me enough to write about it, then it must interest a lot of other people.”

“One has to abandon altogether the search for security, and reach out to the risk of living with both arms. One has to court doubt and darkness as the cost of knowing.”

“I feel the life slipping out of me. When the pain comes, I cry out, but there is no prayer in it, only fear. I kneel and recite my office and the Rosary but the words are empty - dry gourds rattling in the silence. The dark is terrible and I feel so alone. I see no signs but the symbols of contradiction. I try to dispose myself to faith, hope and charity, but my will is a blown reed in the winds of despair.”

“There are still things I want to do but they're not necessary for me to do. I'm not clinging to anything that I can't open my hands and let go.”

“Other priests, he knew, found an intense pleasure in the raw, salty dialect of peasant conversation. They picked up pearls of wisdom and experience over a farmhouse table or a cup of wine in a workingman's kitchen. They talked with equal familiarity to the rough-tongued whores of Trastevere and the polished signori of Parioli. They enjoyed the ribald humor of the fish market as much as the wit of a Cardinal's dinner table. They were good priests too, and they did much good for their people, with a singular satisfaction to themselves.”

“One has to accept pain as a condition of existence. One has to court doubt and darkness as the cost of knowing. One needs a will stubborn in conflict, but apt always to the total acceptance of every consequence of living and dying.”

“I look out of this window and I think this is a cosmos, this is a huge creation, this is one small corner of it. The trees and birds and everything else and I'm part of it. I didn't ask to be put here, I've been lucky in finding myself here.”

“I don't believe in miracles, only unexplained facts.”

“Ever since the Greeks, we have been drunk with language! We have made a cage with words and shoved our God inside!”