The Monk Downstairs
Tim Farrington
Top 10 Best Quotes
“We are born to love as we are born to die, and between the heartbeats of those two great mysteries lies all the tangled undergrowth of our tiny lives. There is nowhere to go but through. And so we walk on, lost, and lost again, in the mapless wilderness of love.”
“We expect God’s presence to be thunderous, spectacular, monumental; but it is our need that is so large. The real presence slips past our demands for spectacle. It slips past our despair.”
“Today she wore a navy blue suit that deftly minimized a slight tendency to heft.”
“ Put your other goddamned sock on", she said. Instead, he took the first sock off. They stared at each other. It was so spectacularly absurd. She could feel the corner of her mouth twitching; she was close to laughing. Rory had used to do the same sort of thing; she'd spent a decade of her life being mollified by simple existential charm. ”
“She loved her daughter, the blessing of a good book, a glass of wine after the day’s wave of vanity had passed.”
“She had a fleeting sense of his God out there somewhere, like the sea itself, invisible and dangerous, a vastness wrapped in darkness, just a long fall away.”
“But deep prayer, prolonged prayer, is a terrible mirror—kneel there long enough and everything shows. There’s no way out of eventually seeing your phoniness and dishonesty.”
“ There didn't seem to be that much to say. If you loved Phoebe now, it was going to hurt you to see her. Like facing cold water, you just jumped in and swam anyway. ”
“ For the rest of the afternoon, Rebecca wandered around the house tidying up halfheartedly, feeling bereft and disoriented, trying to balance impassive mass of all the ordinary things of her life with her sense that everything had changed. Inevitably, the weightless moments with Mike began to seem unreal. All her furniture said that love was a bubble and a fluke. ”
“Real prayer is a disappearance, a surrender to the embrace of deepening mystery, in darkness. In that darkness, finally, God alone is. And God is infinite surprise.”
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Book Keywords:
love, fiction, facing-the-truth
