The Clowns of God (1981)
Contesto: 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.
Author's Note (at the beginning of the novel) <!-- p. 9 -->
Morris West:
36
frasi
0
Mi piace
Morris West: Frasi in inglese
The Heretic (1968)
“O Mother of Christ, who saw what men could do to one who heard an alien music!”
The Heretic (1968)
Contesto: O Mother of Christ, who saw what men could do to one who heard an alien music! Bend to me, be tender. I am blind and deaf and dumb. And yet I do see visions, shout a kind of praise, feel in my pulse apocalyptic drums.
“I say you have no right to make terms for my life. I tell you then — No! I will not recant.”
The Heretic (1968)
Contesto: Who said to me, a foetus in the womb, a puling babe, "You have your life, but on the condition that you thus believe?" No one! Not even God! So gentlemen, I say you have no right to make terms for my life. I tell you then — No! I will not recant.
The Heretic (1968)
Contesto: No man — prince, peasant, pope, — has all the light, who says else is a mountebank. I claim no private lien on truth, only a liberty to seek it, prove it in debate, and to be wrong a thousand times to reach a single rightness. It is that liberty they fear. They want us to be driven to God like sheep, not running to him like lovers, shouting joy!
“If you spend your whole life waiting for the storm, you'll never enjoy the sunshine.”
Origine: The Clowns of God (1981), Ch. II (ellipses in original) <!-- p. 35 -->
This statement begins with a quotation from Horace, Odes, Book I, Ode ix, line 13.
Contesto: "Forbear to ask what tomorrow may bring" … If you spend your whole life waiting for the storm, you'll never enjoy the sunshine.
Reflection of Nicol Peters, journalist, in Ch. III
Lazarus (1990)
Last lines which West had written for his unfinished work The Last Confession, about the last days of Giordano Bruno.
The Last Confession (2000)
Martin Gregory in Ch. 1 (on Irish politicians)
Cassidy (1986)
Cardinal Luca Rossini and his daughter Luisa Ortega in Ch. 7
Eminence (1998)
“That's what faith is about — living with paradox.”
London: Coronet Books, 1984, p. 78
The World Is Made of Glass (1983)
The Shoes of the Fisherman (1963)
“In Switzerland everything that is not forbidden is legal.”
Gisela Mundt in Ch. 10
Masterclass (1988)
“The prevalence of evil is the darkest and most frightening mystery of the universe.”
Cardinal Luca Rossini in Ch. 8
Eminence (1998)
Pope Leo XIV in Ch. XV
Lazarus (1990)
“We never escape our past. It is mirrored in our present. It repeats itself in our future.”
Marius Melville in Ch. 17
Cassidy (1986)
“It doesn't matter what we believe about God. It's what He knows about us.”
London: Coronet Books, 1984, p. 316
The speaker is an eighty-year-old Mother Superior explaining why she allowed the burial in the convent cemetery of a foreign woman, a collaborator in a charitable enterprise, who was an unbeliever.
The World Is Made of Glass (1983)
“I wonder how it will read five hundred years from now?”
To make a man confess a loving God you burn him!
The Heretic (1968)
“There are a few of us — madmen all!”
who are in love with knowing, who would sell the last shirt from our backs for one small truth, one tiny star-fire to light up the murk and mystery of what we call our life… We may go blind before we see it, that's the haunting —
The Heretic (1968)
Prince Alessandro Farnese di Mongrifone in Book 1. London: Mandarin, 1993, p. 176
The Lovers (1993)
Cardinal Francis Spellman in Book 1. London: Mandarin, 1993, p. 67
The Lovers (1993)
“Religion is the good you do in the bad times.”
Gil Langton's late mother, cited twice in Ch. 17, pp. 298 and 300
The Ringmaster (1991)
