Morris West Quotes

Of all the animals in creation, politicians have the shortest memories.

You are all caught in the current of history whose headwaters rise in the dark mountains of the past. You cannot change it; you survive and help others to survive by adapting to it.

In a marriage you need 'compatibility of conscience'.

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.

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.

Because I am a man, I have experience f fear, love and death Because I have been, like you, a political an, I understand the usages of power and its limitations, to! Because I am a Minister of the Word, I know that I am peddling a folly in the market place and that I risk to be stoned for it. You, too, my friends are peddling follies - monstrous insanities - and all of us rish to perish by them!

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

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

I wonder how it will read five hundred years from now? — To make a man confess a loving God you burn him!

I can write no more today. The contemplation of my sorry state has reduced me to so deep a melancholy that I contemplate opening my wrist like Petronius Arbiter and lapsing quietly into oblivion. Unlike Petronius, however, I shall have neither the sound of music nor the gentle talk of friends. I still have time to choose a better moment — besides, who knows to what nightmares I might awake.

To make that long, last donkey-ride between the pikeman and the stake, to hear the shouting and the chant of hypocrites, to be a spectacle for animals in human masks!

I once asked a distinguished biologist to explain to me the genetic imprint, the famous double helix which differentiates one being from another. He called it "the graffito of God", because it can never be erased. All other imprints — of memory, environment, experience — he called "human graffiti".

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.

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.

"Forbear to ask what tomorrow may bring" … If you spend your whole life waiting for the storm, you'll never enjoy the sunshine.