Morris West Quotes

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

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.

You have traveled far, but the hardest part of a journey is always the next step.

He had fallen into the error of all liberals: the belief that men are prepared to reform themselves, that good will attracts good will, that truth has leavening virtue of its own.

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.

History is alwys written by victors, and the defeated create a new set of myths to explain the past and gild the future

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

History, n. An account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.

If you spend your life waiting for the sun you'll never enjoy the storm.

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

We are ants on the carcass of the world, spawned out of nothing, going busily nowhere. One of us dies, the others crawl over us to the pickings.

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.

[The writer] has to be the kind of man who turns the world upside down and says, lookit, it looks different, doesn’t it?

The truth ? the truth my dear Ashely is a luxury available only to those who are not involved in its consequences

Be brave, be clever, and be true to your heart.

If you spend your life waiting for the sun, you'll never enjoy the storm.

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.

I know what you are thinking - you need a sign. What better one could I give than to make this little one whole and new? I could do it, but I will not. I am the Lord and not a conjurer. I gave this mite a gift I denied to all of you - eternal innocence. To you, he looks imperfect but to me he is flawless like the bud that dies unopened or the fledgling that falls from the nest to be devoured by the ants. He will never offend me, as all of you have done. He will never pervert or destroy the work of my Father's hands. He is necessary to you. He will evoke the kindness that will keep you human. His infirmity will prompt you to gratitude for your own good fortune. More! He will remind you every day that I am who I am, that my ways are not yours, and that the smallest dust mite, while in darkest space, does not fall out of my hand. I have chosen you. You have not chosen me. This little one is my sign to you. Treasure him!

Ottoman Empire. “The West,” writes Huntington, “won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion…but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”29

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.

It is not that there is no food,” one commissar insisted. “There is plenty of grain, but 90 percent of the people have ideological problems.

around 11,000 BCE an elderly woman was buried at ‘Ain Mallaha with one hand resting on a puppy, both of them curled up as if asleep.

Western civilization is essentially an amalgam of intellectual constructs which were designed to further the interests of their authors.

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.

We are not going to reduce energy capture unless catastrophe forces us to—which means that the only way to avoid running out of resources, poisoning the planet, or both, will be by tapping into renewable, clean power.

One solved nothing by waving the commandments like a bludgeon at people's heads. There was no point in shouting damnation at a man who was already walking himself to hell on his own two feet. One had to pray for the Grace of God and then go probing like a good psychologist for the fear that might condition him to repentance or the love that might draw him toward it.

In Wright Morris's novel Plains Song, the narrator asks, "Is the past a story we are persuaded to believe, in the teeth of the life we endure in the present?" The question is always open. How we treat our world and each other grows from our vision of how we have come to where we are. Ultimately, of course, the issue is not survival but decency and common sense. Everything passes, the psalmist reminds us. No one escapes. The best we can hope is to learn a little from the speaking dead, to find in our deep past some help in acting wisely in the teeth of life.

Love denied, and the somatic experience of that denial, is─as de Rougemont recognized─the hidden, and gnostic/heretical, thread of Western History.

Politicians and advertisers have turned misleading us with statistics into a fine art. Already

Neither politicians nor statistics always lie; it is just that there is no such thing as a completely neutral way to present either policies or numbers. Every

What all this adds up to is the conclusion that Western rule by 2000 was neither a long-term lock-in nor a short-term accident. It was more of a long-term probability. It

Evolution selects for what we call common sense.

China can fairly be said to have developed the most rational selection processes for state service known to history.

Piracy paid: Drake’s backers realized a 4,700 percent return on their investment, and using just three-quarters of her share Queen Elizabeth cleared England’s entire foreign debt.

the Romans first neutralized Greek philosophy, then turned Christianity into a prop for their empire.

Success creates new problems; solving them creates still newer problems. Life, as they say, is a vale of tears.

We have been cursed to live in interesting times.

One grave of around 6000 BCE held an eight-hole flute, capable of playing any modern melody.

A source of wibbly time stuff – stop me if I’m getting too technical – is heading north-west.

I can't tell you why God made you the way you are any more than I can tell you why he's 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.

A rather unpleasant genetic study has suggested that human body lice, which drink our blood and live in our clothes, evolved around fifty thousand years ago as a little bonus for the first fashionistas.

The great question for our times is not whether the West will continue to rule. It is whether humanity as a whole will break through to an entirely new kind of existence before disaster strikes us down—permanently.

By 1870, Britain’s steam engines generated 4 million horsepower, equivalent to the work of 40 million men, who—if industry had still depended on muscles—would have eaten more than three times Britain’s entire wheat output.

Yet from almost the first moment factories filled England’s skies with smoke, European intellectuals realized that they had a problem. As problems went, it was not a bad one: they appeared to be taking over the world, but did not know why.

L’œuvre est une expression de ce qu'est l'homme, de ce qu'il sent, de ce en quoi il croit. Si elle se perpétue et si elle se développe, ce n'est pas tant à cause de l'homme qui l'a entreprise, mais parce que d'autres hommes pensent et sentent de la même façon.

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.

Look at yourself! You're a priest. You know damn well that if I were setting out to make a girl at this moment instead of young Paolo, you'd take an entirely different view. You'd disapprove, sure! You'd read me a lecture on fornication and all the rest. But you wouldn't be too unhappy. I'd be normal... according to nature! But I am not made like that. God didn't 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?... What's your answer to that Meredith? What's 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 don't need this sort of thing any more? I'm lonely! I need love like the next man! My sort of love!

What the Court will decide is another matter - a legality, based on the canonical rules of evidence, and irrelevant, it seems to me, to the fundamental facts, that the finger of God is here and tat the heaven of goodness in this man is still working in the lives of his people.

I know what you are thinking - you need a sign. What better one could I give than to make this little one whole and new? I could do it, but I will not. I am the Lord and not a conjurer. I gave this mite a gift I denied to all of you - eternal innocence. To you, he looks imperfect but to me he is flawless like the bud that dies unopened or the fledgling that falls from the nest to be devoured by the ants. He will never offend me, as all of you have done. He will never pervert or destroy the work of my Father's hands. He is necessary to you. He will evoke the kindness that will keep you human. His infirmity will prompt you to gratitude for your own good fortune. More! He will remind you every day that I am who I am, that my ways are not yours, and that the smallest dust mite, while in darkest space, does not fall out of my hand. I have chosen you. You have not chosen me. This little one is my sign to you. Treasure him!

THE FOLLOWING DAY, Wednesday, Hendricks telephoned acceptance, and on Friday afternoon Roosevelt joyfully released news of the nomination to the press. Privately, to his old Assembly colleague Henry L. Sprague, he wrote: “I have always been fond of the West African proverb: ‘Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.’ ”28

The West developed the notion of the “corporate body,” the senate or representative assembly; Islam did not. The West, in a secularization of the Catholic corpus mysticum, eventually developed the idea of the corporation that lies at the heart of capitalism; Islam did not. Western science has the notions of the fact-value distinction, genuine critical analysis, and provisional truth; Islam keeps reason subordinate to faith.

In the dry places, men begin to dream. Where the rivers run sand, there is something in man that begins to flow. West of the 98TH Meridian - where it sometimes rain and it sometimes doesn’t – towns, like weeds, spring up when it rains, dry up when it stops. But in a dry climate, the husk of the plant remains. The stranger might find, as if preserved in amber, something of the green life that was once lived there, and the ghosts of men who have gone on to a better place. The withered towns are empty, but not uninhabited. Faces sometimes peer out from the broken windows, or whisper from the sagging balconies, as if this place – now that is dead – had come to life. As if empty it is forever occupied. Reproduced in THE BORSCHT BELT from The Works of Love by Wright Morris by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. Copyright 1949, 1951 by Wright Morris.

The division of historic Mandatory Palestine as proposed, of 79 percent for the Jews and 21 percent for the Palestinian Arabs, cannot fail to leave the Arabs, all Arabs, with a deep sense of injustice, affront, and humiliation and a legitimate perception that a state consisting of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank (and perhaps large parts of East Jerusalem)—altogether some two thousand square miles—is simply not viable, politically and economically.

In ‘Colonization in Reverse’41 (a famous poem much anthologized) the speaker is presented as a more or less reliable commentator who implies that Jamaicans who come to ‘settle in de motherlan’ are like English people who settled in the colonies. West Indian entrepreneurs, shipping off their countrymen ‘like fire’, turn history upside down. Fire can destroy, but may also be a source of warmth to be welcomed in temperate England. Those people who ‘immigrate an populate’ the seat of the Empire seem, like many a colonizer, ready to displace previous inhabitants. ‘Jamaica live fi box bread/Out a English people mout’ plays on a fear that newcomers might exploit the natives; and some of the immigrants are—like some of the colonizers from ‘the motherland’—lazy and inclined to put on airs. Can England, who faced war and braved the worst, cope with people from the colonies turning history upside down? Can she cope with ‘Colonizin in reverse’?

There is no passion in your life, my son. You have never loved a woman, nor hated a man, nor pitied a child. You have withdrawn yourself too long and you are a stranger in the human family. You have asked nothing and given nothing. You have never known the dignity of need nor gratitude for a suffering shared. This is your sickness. This is the cross you have fashioned for your own shoulders. This is where your doubts begin and your fears too – because a man who cannot love his fellows cannot love God either.

Although . . . polls have often concluded that most Palestinians, at least in the West Bank and Gaza, support a two-state settlement, they have also shown that there is almost complete unanimity among Palestinians in support of the “right of return,” the implementation of which would necessarily subvert any two-state settlement. And Palestinian Arabs are equally unanimous in denying the legitimacy of Zionism and Israel—which, again, would raise a vast question mark over the durability of any two-state arrangement.

This is the ultimate heresy, then, and a possible outcome of a history of ascent, of system-breaks and paradigm-shifts that are exciting on one level, tedious on another: life characterized by so much somatic security, so much incarnation, that the need for “truth” is far less important than the need for love; and finally, not really in conflict with it. Incarnation means living in life, not transcending it. The last paradigm-shift has to be a shift to a world in which paradigm-shifts become unnecessary, if not actually banal.

All this comes under the heading of what the journalist Thomas L. Friedman has called “the really scary stuff we already know.” Much worse is what he calls “the even scarier stuff we don’t know.” The problem, Friedman explains, is that what we face is not global warming but “global weirding.” Climate change is nonlinear: everything is connected to everything else, feeding back in ways too bewilderingly complex to model. There will be tipping points when the environment shifts abruptly and irreversibly, but we don’t know where they are or what will happen when we reach them.

Growing up where she did, Beatrix had developed a romantic and adventurous nature, and she had no outlet for it any more. The happiest times I can remember spending with them were when we drove out - twice, I think - to the Long Mynd for a picnic. Roger had long since traded in his motorbike and scraped together enough money to buy a second-hand Morris Minor. Somehow we all squeezed into this (I seem to recall sitting in the front passenger seat, Beatrix sitting behind me with the baby on her lap) and drove out for the afternoon to those wonderful Shropshire hills. I wonder if you have ever walked on them yourself, Imogen. They are part of your story, you know. So many things have changed, changed beyond recognition, in the almost sixty years since the time I'm now recalling, but the Long Mynd is not one of them. In the last few months I have been too ill to walk there, but I did manage to visit in the last spring, to offer what I already sensed would be my final farewells. Places like this are important to me - to all of us - because they exist outside the normal timespan. You can stand on the backbone of the Long Mynd and not know if you are in the 1940s, the 2000s, the tenth or eleventh century... It is all immaterial, all irrelevant. The gorse and the purple heather are unchanging, and so are the sheeptracks which cut through them and criss-cross them, the twisted rocky outcrops which surprise you at every turn, the warm browns of the bracken, the distant greys of the conifer plantations, tucked far away down in secretive valleys. You cannot put a price on the sense of freedom and timelessness that is granted to you there, as you stand on the high ridge beneath a flawless sky of April blue and look across at the tame beauties of the English countryside, to the east, and to the west a hint of something stranger - the beginnings of the Welsh mountains

He spoke a kind of ecclesiastical jargon; a debased rhetoric that explained nothing but brought the truth into disrepute. It begged all the questions and answered none. The massive structure of reason and revelation on which the church was founded was reduced to ritual incantation, formless, fruitless and essentially false. Peppermint piety. It deceived no one but the man who peddled it. It satisfied no one but old ladies and girls in green-sickness; yet it flourished most rankly where the Church was most firmly entrenched in the established order. It was the mark of accommodation, compromise, laxity among the clergy, who find it easier to preach devotion than to affront the moral and social problems of the time. It covered fatuity and lack of education. It left people naked and unarmed in the face of terrifying mysteries: pain, passion, death and the great perhaps of the hereafter.

Dr. Morris Netherton, a pioneer in the field of past-life therapy (and my teacher),7 relates the incident of a patient who returned to her previous life as Rita McCullum. Rita was born in 1903 and lived in rural Pennsylvania with her foster parents until they were killed in a car accident in 1916. In the early 1920s she married a man named McCullum and moved to New York, where they had a garment manufacturing company off Seventh Avenue in midtown Manhattan. Life was hard and money short. Her husband died in 1928. In 1929, her son died from polio, and the stock market crashed. Like many others during the Great Depression, Rita succumbed to bankruptcy and depression. On the sunny day of June 11, 1933, she hanged herself from the ceiling fan of her factory. Because this memory featured traceable facts, Netherton and his patient contacted New York City’s Hall of Records. They received a photocopy of a notarized death certificate of a woman named Rita McCullum. Under manner of death, it stated that she died by hanging at an address in the West Thirties, still today the heart of the garment district. The date of death was June 11, 1933.8

Hundreds, each with a similar tale to tell, came to Trafalgar Square to lay their head against the paving stones. It did not take long for political agitators to recognize that this congregation of the downtrodden was a ready-made army of the angry with nothing to lose. Londoners had long realized that Trafalgar Square sat on an axis between the east and west of the city, the dividing line between rich and poor; an artificial boundary, which, like the invisible restraints that kept the disenfranchised voiceless, could be easily breached. In 1887, the possibility of social revolution felt terrifyingly near for some, and yet for others it did not seem close enough. At Trafalgar Square, the daily speeches given by socialists and reformers such as William Morris, Annie Besant, Eleanor Marx, and George Bernard Shaw led to mobilization, as chanting, banner-waving processions of thousands spilled onto the streets. Inevitably, some resorted to violence. The Metropolitan Police and the magistrate’s court at Bow Street, in Covent Garden, worked overtime to contain the protesters and clear the square of those whom they deemed indigents and rabble-rousers. But like an irrepressible tide, soon after they were pushed out, they returned once more.

Joshua’s eyes went to the north, where the tribes of Dan, Asher, and Naphtali were set in order. To the south, the tribes of Reuben, Simeon, and Gad flanked the tabernacle. On the east stood the tribes of Judah, Issachar, and Zebulun, and to the west were Ephraim, Manasseh, and Benjamin. Joshua took pleasure in the order of the encampment, but then he lifted his eyes toward Canaan on the far side of the Jordan River and a cloud crossed his face. He was not a man of fear but of faith. Still, the commandment to conquer a land filled with strong kings, some of them within walled cities, was daunting. “God will do it,” Joshua said loudly.

Medical science in the West began with the import of Greek and Arabic texts, especially the works of Galen and Avicenna, in the eleventh century. Salerno in Italy established the first medical school. It seems to have been astonishingly enlightened. After Salerno, medical schools were organized at Bologna, Montpellier, and elsewhere.

The power of the businessmen has a curious exemplification. The year began at Easter, anywhere from March 22 to April 25. This made an intolerable calendar for merchants, who required fixed dates for contracts and loans. For the beginning of their year, they chose the minor Feast of the Circumcision, January 1, the date on which the Romans had also inaugurated their year. Business practice was transformed by the introduction of Arabic numerals, with the invaluable zero. The Arabic system was introduced to the West in the twelfth century; it immediately conquered the commercial world.

The Byzantines mounted catapults on their ships; they also introduced the West to Greek Fire, apparently a mixture of petroleum, quicklime, and sulphur. The quicklime in contact with water ignited the bomb, a primitive napalm.

There was never a greater crime against humanity than the fourth crusade,” says Stephen Runciman. It destroyed the treasures of the past and broke down the most advanced culture of Europe. Far from uniting Eastern and Western Christendom, it implanted in the Greeks a hostility toward the West that has never entirely disappeared, and it weakened the Byzantine defenses against the rising power of the Ottoman Turks, to whom they eventually succumbed.

The manorial system, widespread in the West from Charlemagne’s time onward, was not at first favorable to the development of agriculture and commerce. Manors tended to be self-sufficient; the economy was closed. Men lived in their small world, in constant fear of the strange world beyond, from which came only evil. The best they could hope for was to endure, and they endured.

El valor moral de un acto depende de la intención con que se realiza".

Predicamos la caridad y la compasión, pero raras veces lo que significan".

Primero hay que educar el corazón y después la cabeza".

Here on the West Coast a soda jerk, willing to choose between a chick and a Thunderbird, can have the Thunderbird.

Here is the thing you must bear in mind,” Roosevelt said, clearly irritated. “I do not represent public opinion: I represent the public. There is a wide difference between the two, between the real interests of the public, and the public’s opinion of these interests. I must represent not the excited opinion of the West, but the real interests of the whole people.

Me gusta caminar. Me gusta esta hora en que han salido las estrellas, los niños duermen y los centinelas están demasiado cansados como para vigilar atentamente. Es una hora de esperanzas. Todos necesitamos esperanzas.

Out of the corner of her eye Victoria could see the little Chinese band on the pier. Their silk robes and funny hats had looked splendid an hour ago, but were now thoroughly bedraggled in the English rain. Four times the band had struck up some Oriental cacophony, thinking that Qiying’s litter was about to be carried ashore, and four times had given up. The fifth time, though, they stuck to it. Victoria’s stomach lurched. Qiying must be ashore at last. It was really happening.

people invested an estimated 30 million hours of labor in the most enigmatic monument of all, Stonehenge. One

Thinking of it rends my entrails.

by restructuring themselves, inventing new institutions that kept them one step ahead of the disruptions that their continuing expansion itself generated.

Biology tells us that we are animals, and like all living things we exist only because we capture energy from our surroundings. When

We all have free will, and, as I have repeatedly stressed, our choices do change the world. It is just that most of our choices do not change the world very much.

Great men (and women) clearly like thinking that by force of will alone they are changing the world, but they are mistaken.

(In addition to writing The Prince, Machiavelli also penned the finest comedies of his age.) Visitors

There is no more need for writing; what is left is to practice.

If there is any place for bungling idiots in this story, it surely belongs to Columbus, who opened the road to Tenochtitlán by massively underestimating the distance around the globe and refusing to believe that he had the numbers wrong. Conversely,

the Founding Fathers (who, incidentally, tended to use the word “democracy” as a term of abuse, just one step above mob rule).

Some think he was trying to invent monotheism; no less a luminary than Sigmund Freud argued that Moses stole this concept from Akhenaten while the Hebrews were in Egypt. There

It has the heart of a tiger or wolf; greedy, loving profit, and untrustworthy, knowing nothing of ritual, duty, or virtuous conduct.” Yet despite being the antithesis of everything Confucian gentlemen held dear, Qin exploded from the edge of the Eastern core to conquer the whole of

Qin had invented the body count.

know both of them felt badly over this estrangement, and would have been glad at any time to come to a reconciliation; but neither would make the advance. Under these circumstances my father would not write to Hamer for the appointment, but he wrote to Thomas Morris, United States Senator from Ohio, informing him that there was a vacancy at West Point from our district, and that he would be glad if I could be appointed to fill it. This letter, I presume, was turned over to Mr. Hamer, and, as there was no other applicant, he cheerfully appointed me. This healed the breach between the two, never after reopened

By 1982, the mileage had paid off. Berlin had worked regularly with Top Jimmy & the Rhythm Pigs (playing on and producing the band’s only album, Piggus Drunkus Maximus, belatedly issued in 1987), the Plugz (with whom he recorded the band’s 1981 sophomore set, Better Luck), Phast Phreddie and Thee Precisions (as tenor saxophonist on Bomp’s 1981 live album West Hollywood Freeze-Out), and the “all-star” iteration of the Flesh Eaters (on the 1981 Ruby/Slash album A Minute to Pray, A Second to Die). The latter unit included the Blasters’ Dave Alvin. Berlin

You are not born to peace, my friend. This is the first thing you must accept. You will not come to it, perhaps, till the day you die. Each of us has his own cross, you know, made and fitted to his reluctant shoulders.

And each [band of ancient humans] surely knew that their gods loved them, because they were, in spite of everything, still alive.

they sometimes affirm his identity without understanding his individuality,

A nadie —contestó Rossini—. Todos llevamos demasiada historia a nuestras espaldas, y la historia modifica todo lo que hacemos o decimos. El Santo Padre viajó a París para saludar a los jóvenes. Grandiosas manifestaciones,

negocios ahora, ¿de acuerdo?

y el dinero. Lo conocía a fondo: el ritmo sin descanso, el olor, el sabor a sangre amarga, el acecho furtivo, el lenguaje que se hablaba en el mercado.

porque albergaba una ligera esperanza de

He took her in in his arms and kissed her. The coffeepot boiled over and they laughed and laughed with the simple foolish joy of being alive.

If his time must be shortened, then he wanted to spend the last of it in the soft air of England, to walk the downs and the beechwoods and hear the elegiac song of the nightingales in the shadow of the old churches, where Death was more familiar and more friendly because the English had spent centuries teaching him politeness.