Dorothy Day Quotes

“What we would like to do is change the world...by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, of the poor, of the destitute. We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever widening circle will reach around the world.”
― Dorothy Day

“A custom existed among the first generations of Christians, when faith was a bright fire that warmed more than those who kept it burning. In every house then a room was kept ready for any stranger who might ask for shelter; it was even called “the stranger’s room.” Not because these people thought they could trace something of someone they loved in the stranger who used it, not because the man or woman to whom they gave shelter reminded them of Christ, but because—plain and simple and stupendous fact—he or she was Christ.”
― Dorothy Day, Selections from Her Writings

“We must practice the presence of God. He said that when two or three are gathered together, there he is in the midst of them. He is with us in our kitchens, at our tables, on our breadlines, with our visitors, on our farms. When we pray for our material needs, it brings us close to his humanity. He, too, needed food and shelter; he, too, warmed his hands at a fire and lay down in a boat to sleep.”
― Dorothy Day, The Reckless Way of Love: Notes on Following Jesus

“Does God have 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 Reckless Way of Love: Notes on Following Jesus

“We suffer these things and they fade form memory. But daily, hourly, to give up our own possessions and especially to subordinate our own impulses and wishes to to others - these are hard, hard things; and I don't think they ever get any easier.

You can strip yourself, you can be stripped, but still you will reach out like an octopus to seek your own comfort, your untroubled time, your ease, your refreshment. It may mean books or music - the gratification of the inner sense - or it may mean food and drink, coffee and cigarettes. The one kind of giving up is no easier than the other.”
― Dorothy Day, The Reckless Way of Love: Notes on Following Jesus

“A philosophy of work is essential if we would be whole men, holy men, healthy men, joyous men. A certain amount of goods is necessary for a man to lead a good life, and we have to make that kind of society where it is easier for men to be good.”
― Dorothy Day, The Reckless Way of Love: Notes on Following Jesus

“When we are asked to show our love for God, our desire for him, when he asks us as Jesus asked Peter, 'Lovest thou me?' we have to give proof of it. 'Lovest thou me more than these, more than any human companionship, more than any human love?' It is not filth and ugliness, drugs and drink and perversion he is asking us to prefer him to. He is asking us to prefer him to all beauty and loveliness. To all other love. He is giving us a chance to prove our faith, our hope, our charity. It is as hard and painful as Abraham's ordeal, when he thought he was asked to perform a human sacrifice and immolate his son.”
― Dorothy Day, The Reckless Way of Love: Notes on Following Jesus

“Love is an exchange of gifts,' Saint Ignatius had said. It was in these simple, practical, down-to-earth ways that people could show their love for each other. If the love was not there in the beginning, but only the need, such gifts made love grow.”
― Dorothy Day, The Reckless Way of Love: Notes on Following Jesus

“My soul hath thirsted after the strong living God; when shall I come and appear before the face of God?' (Psalm 42:2) But the Psalmist also says, 'In death there is no one that is mindful of thee.' So it made me happy that I could be with my mother the last few weeks of her life, and for the last ten days at her bedside daily and hourly. Sometimes I thought to myself that it was like being present at a birth to sit by a dying person and see their intentness on what is happening to them. It almost seems that one is absorbed in a struggle, a fearful, grim, physical struggle, to breathe, to swallow, to live. And so, I kept thinking to myself, how necessary it is for one of their loved ones to be beside them, to pray for them, to offer up prayers for them unceasingly, as well as to do all those little offices one can. When my daughter was a little tiny girl, she said to me once, 'When I get to be a great big woman and you are a little tiny girl, I'll take care of you,' and I thought of that when I had to feed my mother by the spoonful and urge her to eat her custard. How good God was to me, to let me be there. I had prayed so constantly that I would be beside her when she died; for years I had offered up that prayer. And God granted it quite literally. I was there, holding her hand, and she just turned her head and sighed.”
― Dorothy Day, The Reckless Way of Love: Notes on Following Jesus

“Now don't think I've lost my mind - but I'll tell you, I'll look at some of the cards I have, some of Van Gogh's pictures of the poor, the coal miners, or Daumier's, and I talk to those pictures! I look, and I speak. I get strength form the way those writers and artists portrayed the poor, that's how I've kept going all these years. I pray to God and go visit him in churches; and I have my conversational time with Van Gogh or with Dickens - I mean, I'll look at a painting reproduced on a postcard, that I use as a bookmark, or I read one of those underlined pages in one of my old books, and Lord, I've got my strength to get through the morning or afternoon! When I die, I hope people will say that I tried to be mindful of what Jesus told us - his wonderful stories - and I tried my best to live up to his example (we fall flat on our faces all the time, though!) and I tried to take those artists and novelists to heart, and live up to their wisdom (a lot of it came from Jesus, as you probably know, because Dickens and Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy kept thinking of Jesus themselves all through their lives).”
― Dorothy Day, The Reckless Way of Love: Notes on Following Jesus

“MEDITATION ON THE BUS. Rainy and cold. Thinking gloomily of the sins and shortcomings of others, it suddenly came to me to remember my own offenses, just as heinous as those of others. If I concern myself with my own sins and lament them, if I remember my own failures and lapses, I will not be resentful of others. This was most cheering and lifted the load of gloom from my mind. It makes one unhappy to judge people and happy to love them.”
― Dorothy Day, The Reckless Way of Love: Notes on Following Jesus

“A community is not a place where 'desert fathers' are testing themselves - more and more, harder and harder, each on his own. A community is what Saint Paul told us - our differences granted respect by one another, but those differences are not allowed to turn us into loners. You must know when to find your own, quiet moment of solitude. But you must know when to open the door to go with others, and you must know how to open the door. There's not point in opening the door with bitterness and resentment in your heart.”
― Dorothy Day, The Reckless Way of Love: Notes on Following Jesus

“We are communities in time and in a place, I know, but we are communities in faith as well - and sometimes time can stop shadowing us. Our lives are touched by those who lived centuries ago, and we hope that our lives will mean something to people who won't be alive until centuries from now. It's a great "chain of being," someone once told me, and I think our job is to do the best we can to hold up our small segment of the chain connected, unbroken. Our arms are linked - we try to be neighbors of His, and to speak up for his principles. That's a lifetime's job.”
― Dorothy Day, The Reckless Way of Love: Notes on Following Jesus

“Dorothy's world had become very small-visits to the chapel downstairs, vespers, and Communion, and opera on the radio (including Wagner, whom she refused to let Hitler, or even Wagner himself, ruin for her).”
― Kate Hennessy, Dorothy Day; The World Will Be Saved By Beauty: An Intimate Portrait of Dorothy Day

“You and Aldous Huxley", she said, "both have the same superior hate for the rest of the human race and wouldn't go one inch out of your way to help anyone. Evil has far more reality than good in your minds.”
― Kate Hennessy, Dorothy Day; The World Will Be Saved By Beauty: An Intimate Portrait of Dorothy Day

“She protested on behalf of the working classes.”
― David Brooks