Alison Smith > Quotes

“Losing your faith in a world where God is all around you is a precarious business. When God shows his face on a daily basis to your friends and neighbors, it is, on some level, impossible to stop believing in Him. Instead i felt that God chose to exclude me from His world. Since i was the only one to lose faith, to stop hearing Christ's voice, i thought perhaps it was my fault that Roy had left us. I thought i was being punished for some unknown sin. I had learned early in my Catholic career that one could sin silently in one's heart. One could even sin without ever discovering what one had done or why it was wrong. What had i done, i asked myself, to make God disappear and take Roy with Him.”
― Alison Smith

“In the dimly lit basement hall of Saints Peter and Paul’s Soup Kitchen, in the back alleys behind the bus station, in the urine-scented wards of the state mental hospital, I saw, firsthand, that it was possible to lose everything and still go on.”
― Alison Smith, Name All the Animals: A Memoir