Nora Gallagher > Quotes

“Doubt is to me the handmaiden to faith, its cop, the one that keeps faith straight. To doubt is an indication of freedom and a guard against fanaticism.”
― Nora Gallagher

“What I want from the church, or any faith community, I see now, is a look between human beings that says we are knitted together, standing in a circle, holding each other up, waiting for the next ax to fall, rather than persons following a crowned Jesus, believing in an oppressive creed and tinny, false hope. That "religion" is about wanting the thing to last forever and make the pain go away. The reality is, instead, more about Jesus kneeling in the dust making a paste of spit and dirt. The reality is much more raw.”
― Nora Gallagher

“Every person was a mystery […] It was as if each of us had another, deeper life than the one being lived. It lies underneath our ordinary days, our errands, the doing of dishes, the writing of letters, the making of money, like something moving, lobster-like, underwater. This only partially understood life (refused, often; banished, easily ignored) might be what we call the soul. The desire to know about it causes us to pray. But all the while, it’s moving toward something, as surely as we are advancing in our lives, through careers, marriage, children. Every now and then, this hidden life surfaces, as if to enact itself, to bring something to fulfillment. Often, this happens when it intersects with another’s […] it was like a glimpse of things in that peculiar, vivid light after a rain.”
― Nora Gallagher, Changing Light: A Novel

“Part of my life no longer made sense. A life of meetings stretched between appointments, half listening to people, always running late. A life dictated by clocks and money and computers and cars, without hawks and lakes and wild roses. A world increasingly without surprise or humor. I thought of how we as a species have endangered not only animals and plants around us but the wild nature of our own lives. We have fabricated this world, to paraphrase the writer Phillip Sherrard, and our punishment is that we have to adapt to it.”
― Nora Gallagher

“Books were to my family's house like beds and stoves, the most basic items, necessary for survival”
― Nora Gallagher