A Movable Feast Quotes

A mother is always a mother, since a mother is a biological fact, whilst a father is a movable feast.

What kind of bodies are movable and feasts. What color are visions.

You find everything on earth at Harry's." "Yes, my Colonel. Except, possibly, happiness." "I'll damn well find happiness, too," the Colonel assured him. "Happiness, as you know, is a movable feast.

Over the years, my church gave me passage into a menagerie of exotic words unknown in the South: "introit," "offertory," "liturgy," "movable feast," "the minor elevation," "the lavabo," "the apparition of Lourdes," and hundreds more. Latin deposited the dark minerals of its rhythms on the shelves of my spoken language. You may find the harmonics of the Common of the Mass in every book I've ever written. Because I was raised Roman Catholic, I never feared taking any unchaperoned walks through the fields of language. Words lifted me up and filled me with pleasure.

Mexico, as it was in the 1970s—and isn’t now—was my Paris. With Mexicans, Europeans, and Americans I celebrated life and the journey, which took on qualities of a pilgrimage in which every moment was a movable feast and every place was a shrine. Among the intricately carved ruins in the jungle at Palenque, I partook of the Mayan sacrament, the sacred psilocybin mushroom, and there I learned to see.

... Paris was no more Babylon than it was New Jerusalem. All cities worthy of that name were both: they were one because they were the other...

But then sanity was a movable feast, wasn't it? One man's madness might be another's politics.

Sanity is a movable feast. One man's madness is another's politics.

This is a question of freedom,” he says. “Which can be discussed until forever, breaking only for sleep, tea, and movable feasts. Would you like to do that? Tell me, if you please, who is more free: an elephant stomping across the savanna or an aphid sitting on the leaf of whatever plant they sit on?” Smoker

Paul called it prayer “without ceasing.”[13] The Spanish Carmelite Saint John of the Cross called it “silent love” and urged us to “remain in loving attention on God.” Madame Guyon—the French mystic—called it a “continuous inner act of abiding.” The old Quakers called it “centering down,”[14] as if abiding was getting in touch with the bedrock of all reality. The Jesuit spiritual director Jean-Pierre de Caussade called it “the sacrament of the present moment,” as if each moment with God is its own Eucharist, its own movable feast.[15] A. W. Tozer called it “habitual, conscious communion” and said, “At the heart of the Christian message is God Himself waiting for His redeemed children to push in to conscious awareness of His presence.”[16] Dallas Willard loved to call it “the with-God life.”[17] So many saints, with so many names for life with Jesus. But my undisputed favorite is from a monk named Brother Lawrence, who called this “the practice of the presence of God.

The current fast food fuss obscures the reality that such foods are ancient. Fried kibbeh, sausages, olives, nuts, small pizzas, and flat breads have been sold on the streets of Middle Eastern and North African cities for a cycle of centuries; Marco Polo reported barbequed meats, deep-fried delicacies, and even roast lamb for sale in Chinese markets.

Ernest Hemingway called Paris a movable feast. I think New York is all you-can banquet.

So keep gathering, keep it weird, embrace the movable feast, and practice brave, awkward, difficult hospitality as a way of fighting against isolation and othering, a way of healing what’s been broken and loving our world and our own selves back to life.

In A Movable Feast, Hemingway writes about writing. He describes the difference between his writing a story, and a story writing itself. When he finds himself writing the story, he knows it’s time to stop for the day. Our life is meant to be a story that mysteriously writes itself, and