Quotes by Morris West

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

“Sometimes God calms the storm, sometimes He calms the sailor”

“Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air…”

“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.”

“You are also caught with the fact that 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.”

“They got out of the car and took off into the Royal Palm Village area (a mobile home community) where they stole a four-wheeler.”

“[Among them was Police Chief Morris West, who was a detective when Horner was killed. Two of the named suspects in the case, Robert Winston and the man accused of shooting Horner, Charles Fowler, are Wests cousins.] You can choose your neighbors, but you cant choose your family, ... Its sad.”

“They hit the rear end of the Tahoe and flipped,”

I dont believe in miracles, only unexplained facts.

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.

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 ones 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.

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.

If prayer fails I am in a greater darkness yet, not knowing whether I have presumed too much or believed too little.

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.

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.

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 workingmans 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 Cardinals dinner table. They were good priests too, and they did much good for their people, with a singular satisfaction to themselves.

Look at yourself! Youre a priest. You know damn well that if I were setting out to make a girl at this moment instead of young Paolo, youd take an entirely different view. Youd disapprove, sure! Youd read me a lecture on fornication and all the rest. But you wouldnt be too unhappy. Id be normal... according to nature! But I am not made like that. God didnt make me like that. But do I need love the less? Do I need satisfaction less? Have I less right to live in contentment because somewhere along the line the Almighty slipped a cog in creation?... Whats your answer to that Meredith? Whats your answer for me? Tie a knot in myself and take up badminton and wait till they make me an angel in heaven, where they dont need this sort of thing any more? Im lonely! I need love like the next man! My sort of love!

I cant tell you why God made you the way you are any more than I can tell you why hes planted a carcinoma in my stomach to make me die painfully while other men die peacefully in their sleep. The cogs of creation seem to slip all the time. Babies are born with two heads, mothers of families run crazy with carving knives, men die in plague, famine and thunderstorms. Why? Only God knows.

Even in sin, the act of love -done with love- is shadowed with divinity. Its conformity may be at fault, but its nature is not altered, and its nature is creative, communicative, splendid in surrender. It was in the splendor of my surrender to Nina and she to me, that I first understood how a man might surrender himself to God -if a God existed. The moment of love is a moment of union -of body and spirit- and the act of faith is mutual and implicit.

I believe in saints as I believe in sanctity. I believe in miracles as I believe in God, who can suspend the laws of His own making. But I believe, too, that the hand of God writes plainly and simply, for all men of good will to read. I am doubtful of His presence in confusion and conflicting voices.