Morris West: Quotes about God

“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.”

Morris West

The Clowns of God (1981)
Context: 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)

God

“If God be God and man a creature made in image of the divine intelligence, his noblest function is the search for truth.”

Morris West

The Heretic (1968)

God , Truth , Search , Intelligence

“Rossini was gentle with her. "In one way or another, we all have to cope with the essential solitude of being human, whether we're celibate or married."
"If you're a good person, doesn't God fill your loneliness?"
"He fills it, I think, with a divine discontent."”

Morris West

Cardinal Luca Rossini and his daughter Luisa Ortega in Ch. 7
Eminence (1998)

God , Way , Thinking , Solitude

“I wonder how it will read five hundred years from now? — To make a man confess a loving God you burn him!”

Morris West

The Heretic (1968)

Love , God , Reading

“Ever since the Greeks, we have been drunk with language! We have made a cage with words and shoved our God inside!”

Morris West

The Heretic (1968)

God

“I once asked a distinguished biologist to explain to me the genetic imprint, the famous double helix which differentiates one being from another. He called it "the graffito of God", because it can never be erased. All other imprints — of memory, environment, experience — he called "human graffiti."”

Morris West

Pope Leo XIV in Ch. XV
Lazarus (1990)

God , Memory

“It doesn't matter what we believe about God. It's what He knows about us.”

Morris West

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)

God

“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.”

Morris West

The Heretic (1968)

God , Life