Morris West Quotes

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.

The prevalence of evil is the darkest and most frightening mystery of the universe.

Rossini was gentle with her. "In one way or another,we all have to cope with the essential solitude of being human, whether we're celibate or married."
"If you're a good person, doesn't God fill your loneliness?"
"He fills it, I think, with a divine discontent."

My father used to say that we surrendered our youth to purchase wisdom. What he never told me was how badly we get cheated on the exchange rate!

[W]hen you get to Rome you have two other rules to learn: never assume that what you see is what is; never believe that what you're told is the whole truth. It's only when you've grasped that — and the Romans know you've grasped it — that you begin to win respect and make progress.

Nothing is permanent. Tomorrow the caravan moves on. The wheels turn. The flowers bloom and die. The good we do in bad times is a seed planted for others to harvest. Evil is a dark hole in creation, where good may once have flourished, where it may take root again one starlit night, when the wounded world murmurs in a healing sleep.

Religion is the good you do in the bad times.

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.

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

When friends do business, there is no need of contracts. Unfortunately, there are no friends in business.

Every tribe in the world had its own version of the scapegoat, marked for exile or persecution when the homefolk needed to purge themselves of their own guilts.

In politics there is no morality anyway. The nature of the game precludes it. A politician's career depends upon the fickle wind of public opinion. He is forced to trim his conscience to catch every shift of the breeze.

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".

The longer he practised his craft, the more conscious he became of the dynamic of language, of speech and writing as events in themselves. The simplest and most obvious proposition, stated in the most elementary language, could so mutate itself in the mind of the reader that it could express the opposite of what the writer had intended. What he wrote as evidence for the defence could hang the man he was defending.

In a marriage you need 'compatibility of conscience'.