Wallis > Wallis's Quotes

“Life and death are like two locked caskets, each of which contains the key to the other.”
― Isak Dinesen

“A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning.”
― James Dickey

“She wanted something to happen - something, anything: she did not know what.”
― Kate Chopin

“What I am
is tired of jam.”
― Russell Hoban

“Once a priest told us that no one gets up in the pulpit without promulgating a heresy. He was joking, of course, but what I suppose he meant was the truth was so pure, so holy, that it was hard to emphasize one aspect of the truth without underestimating another, that we did not see things as a whole, but through a glass darkly, as St. Paul said.”
― Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist – A Greenwich Village Journalist's Conversion and Commitment to Peace and Justice

“I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.”
― Dorothy Day

“The Gospel takes away our right forever, to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor.”
― Dorothy Day

“People say, "What is the sense of our small effort?" They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time.”
― Dorothy Day

“Writing is hard work. But if you want to become a writer you will become one. Nothing will stop you.”
― Dorothy Day

“Maybe I was praying for him then, in my own way. Does God have a set way of prayer, a way that He expects each of us to follow? I doubt it. I believe some people-- lots of people-- pray through the witness of their lives, through the work they do, the friendships they have, the love they offer people and receive from people. Since when are words the only acceptable form of prayer?”
― Dorothy Day

“The best things to do with the best things in life is to give them away.”
― Dorothy Day

“Paperwork, cleaning the house, dealing with the innumerable visitors who come all through the day, answering the phone, keeping patience and acting intelligently, which is to find some meaning in all that happens – these things, too, are the works of peace.”
― Dorothy Day

“Love and ever more love
is the only solution to every problem that comes up.”
― Dorothy Day

“Music acts like a magic key, to which the most tightly closed heart opens.”
― Maria von Trapp

“Music- what a powerful instrument, what a mighty weapon!”
― Maria Augusta Trapp, The Story of the Trapp Family Singers

“Christianity nowadays is like a big household where many cousins live under the same roof. They all belong to the same clan, but at times they have very different ideas about how to run their family affairs.
Some of them, for instance, have no use for any outside devotion. God is a spirit, and He wants to be worshipped in spirit only, they say. Consequently, they have dispensed with all liturgy. They don’t want any distracting ceremonies, no incense, no vestments, no music, no pictures and images, not even sacraments—only the service of the spirit.
The trouble is, however, that as long as we live here on earth, we simply are not pure spirits, but we have also a body, and in that body, a very human heart; and this heart needs outward signs of its inward affections. That is why we embrace and kiss the one we love; and the more we love, the more ardently we press him to this very heart—somehow it seems as if these cousins had overlooked that fact. But you can’t cheat the heart; it knows what it wants, and it knows how to get it.”
― Maria Augusta Trapp

“One of the most fundamental problems in the spiritual order is that we sense within ourselves the hunger for God, but we attempt to satisfy it with some created good that is less than God. Thomas Aquinas said that the four typical substitutes for God are wealth, pleasure, power, and honor. Sensing the void within, we attempt to fill it up with some combination of these four things, but only by emptying out the self in love can we make the space for God to fill us. The classical tradition referred to this errant desire as "concupiscence," but I believe that we could neatly express the same idea with the more contemporary term "addiction." When we try to satisfy the hunger for God with something less than God, we will naturally be frustrated, and then in our frustration, we will convince ourselves that we need more of that finite good, so we will struggle to achieve it, only to find ourselves again, necessarily, dissatisfied. At this point, a sort of spiritual panic sets in, and we can find ourselves turning obsessively around this creaturely good that can never in principle make us happy.”
― Robert Barron

“The failure of political leaders to help uplift the poor will be judged a moral failure.”
― Jim Wallis

“Hey," said Shadow. "Huginn or Muninn, or whoever you are."
The bird turned, head tipped, suspiciously, on one side, and it stared at him with bright eyes.
"Say 'Nevermore,'" said Shadow.
"Fuck you," said the raven.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, to absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Create a story of which you will be proud.”
― Pam Jenoff, The Lost Girls of Paris

“Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.”
― Helen Keller, The Open Door

“Death is no more than passing from one room into another. But there's a difference for me, you know. Because in that other room I shall be able to see.”
― Helen Keller

“Keep your face to the sun and you will never see the shadows.”
― Helen Keller

“Do you know a cure for me?"

"Why yes," he said, "I know a cure for everything. Salt water."

"Salt water?" I asked him.

"Yes," he said, "in one way or the other. Sweat, or tears, or the salt sea.”
― Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales

“Perhaps he knew, as I did not, that the Earth was made round so that we would not see too far down the road.”
― Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa

“If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Will the air over the plain quiver with a color that I have had on, or the children invent a game in which my name is, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?”
― Isak Dinesen

“I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.”
― Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa

“The logic of nuclear deterrence gets more and more convoluted the deeper one goes into it. It is assumed, for instance, that the leaders of Russia, in contemplating an attack on the UK, would be sufficiently sane and rational as to weigh up the consequences of a possible retaliatory nuclear strike from the UK and decide on that basis to refrain from attacking. On the other hand, it is assumed that those same leaders would base their sane and rational decision on the likelihood of their counterparts in the UK acting so insanely and irrationally as to be willing to launch nuclear weapons against Russia that would almost certainly bring about their own total self-destruction.”
― Timmon Milne Wallis, The Truth About Trident: Disarming the Nuclear Argument

“Para ser feliz, hace falta coraje.”
― Isak Dinesen