Catholic Authors Quotes

Katie had slept through morning mass but she could still go to confession and make an effort to banish her unholy and unhealthy thoughts. Mother never asked what she was thinking and feeling on these trips; she just assumed that anything Katie had on her mind was dirty and sinful. ~ Carol Storm

God abides in men"

"God abides in men,
These are men who are simple,
they are fields of corn...
Such men have minds
like wide grey skies,
they have the grandeur
that the fools call emptiness.

God abides in men.

Some men are not simple,
they live in cities
among the teeming buildings,
wrestling with forces
as strong as the sun and the rain.
Often they must forgo dream upon dream...
Christ walks in the wilderness
in such lives.
God abides in men,
because Christ has put on
the nature of man, like a garment, and worn it to his own shape.
He has put on everyone's life...
to the workman's clothes to the King's red robes,
to the snowy loveliness of the wedding garment...
Christ has put on Man's nature,
and given him back his humanness...

God abides in man. ~ Caryll Houselander

The two of them had discovered it was all right to open the closets ... as long as you didn't poke too far back in them. Because things might still be lurking there, ready to bite. ~ Stephen King

During our religious instruction in school, we always asked: How can one prove the existence of God? And I have learned that the Catholic Church, which is never at a loss for an answer when it comes to existential questions, responds as follows: This question simply does not arise. ~ Jean-Claude Juncker

But, my dear friend Wildfire," said Carl Peterson laying his hand on the Indian's shoulder, "this is not a policy to live by."

"Then let it be a policy to die by," defiantly spoke the Indian. "If we cannot be free, let us die. What is life to a caged bird, threatened with death on all sides? ~ S. Alice Callahan

What good is all this free-thinking, modernity, and turncoat flexibility if at some gut level you are still a Christian, a Catholic, and even a priest! ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

My children have gone to Catholic school ... Part of their whole education is talking about the inner life and looking at your life, even though you're only 15 or 16 - thinking about your mortality, thinking about the value of your life, thinking about your obligations. ~ Alice McDermott

I understand that it's disheartening to pour effort and money into a work of art and find that others do not value it with the same intensity. I've been to this rodeo more than a few times, and yes, it's painful and hard on the soul. It is also the sort of thing that grown-ups do every day. Anyone deluded enough to think they are owed monetary success because they bled for their art is in for some hard, hard knocks and buckets full of tears. There will be many cries of "unfair" and much jealousy and hatred. And to be fair, all authors go through this every time they watch their books ride the waves of bestseller charts and the ego torture chamber known as Goodreads reviews. Even the most well-adjusted of us watch that horrible piece of shit book beat our baby to pieces and gnash our teeth and shout at our monitors demanding to know what brain-donors are shopping on amazon.com these days.

But holy Smart Bitch on a cracker, Batman, to write a post about how stupid readers are and worse to actually put it out there on the internet is so beyond the pale there's a special hell for that kind of idiocy. Let me repeat: authors exist at the pleasure of readers. Without the people who buy and read my books, I am just another dizzy broad writing shit down. Readers aren't just an author's audience; they are her lifeblood.
-- ~ Heidi Cullinan

There are many readers of the book, who don't know anything about the authors and the artists. There is more than one author. It doesn't matter, if you can't make the reader dive into the story and surround him with that environment and those characters. That's an experience that lasts longer than figuring out who did what. I think that's what makes our working relationship better, it helps us to make a book that feels unique and not like different voices. ~ Gabriel Ba

The makers of fortunes have a second love of money as a creation of their own, resembling the affection of authors for their own poems, or of parents for their children, besides that natural love of it for the sake of use and profit which is common to them and all men. And hence they are very bad company, for they can talk about nothing but the praises of wealth. ~ Plato

How many times do we hear: 'Come on, you Christians, be a little bit more normal, like other people, be reasonable!' This is real snake charmer's talk: 'Come on, just be like this, okay? A little bit more normal, don't be so rigid ... ' But behind it is this: 'Don't come here with your stories, that God became man!' The Incarnation of the Word, that is the scandal behind all of this! We can do all the social work we want, and they will say: 'How great the Church is, it does such good social work. But if we say that we are doing it because those people are the flesh of Christ, then comes the scandal. And that is the truth, that is the revelation of Jesus: that presence of Jesus incarnate. ~ Pope Francis

If I had to live in a city I think I would prefer New Orleans to any other--both Southern and Catholic and with indications that the Devil's existence is freely recognized. ~ Flannery O'Connor

I didn't believe in a guardian angel when I was young. I was brought up in the Protestant faith, and the one thing you had over your Catholic friends was that you didn't have those awful saints chivvying you around. ~ Jennifer Johnston

I would give them (aspiring writers) the oldest advice in the craft: Read and write. Read a lot. Read new authors and established ones, read people whose work is in the same vein as yours and those whose genre is totally different. You've heard of chain-smokers. Writers, especially beginners, need to be chain-readers. And lastly, write every day. Write about things that get under your skin and keep you up at night. ~ Khaled Hosseini

The first phase of modernism, which so far as the English language goes we associate with Pound and Yeats, Wyndham Lewis and Eliot and Joyce, was clerkly enough, sceptical in many ways; and yet we can without difficulty convict most of these authors of dangerous lapses into mythical thinking. All were men of critical temper, haters of the decadence of the times and the myths of mauvaise foi. All, in different ways, venerated tradition and had programmes which were at once modern and anti-schismatic. This critical temper was admittedly made to seem consistent with a strong feeling for renovation; the mood was eschatological, but scepticism and a refined traditionalism held in check what threatened to be a bad case of literary primitivism. It was elsewhere that the myths ran riot. ~ Frank Kermode

Where perfumed rivers flow,
Is the home of my beloved.
Where passing breezes halt,
Is the home of my beloved.

Where dawn arrives on bare toes,
Where night paints henna-beams on feet,
Where fragrance bathes in moonlight,
Is the home of my beloved.

Where rays of light roam nakedly,
In green forests of sandalwood.
Where the flame seeks the lamp,
Is the home of my beloved.

Where sunsets sleep on wide waters,
And the deer leap.
Where tears fall for no reason,
Is the home of my beloved.

Where the farmer sleeps hungry,
Even though the wheat is the color of my beloved,
Where the wealthy ones lie in hiding,
Is the home of my beloved.

Where perfumed rivers flow,
Is the home of my beloved.
Where passing breezes halt,
Is the home of my beloved. ~ Shiv Kumar Batalvi

I was raised in a Catholic family, spent twelve years in parochial schools, and had extremely fond memories of my interactions with Catholic clergy. ~ Jennifer Haigh

There's something more surprising than becoming a bestseller, and that's receiving messages of hate by other fellow authors. ~ Daniel Marques

Sometimes the fresh load of guests would turn up before we had got rid of the previous group, and the chaos was indescribable; the house and garden would be dotted with poets, authors, artists, and playwrights arguing, painting, drinking, typing, and composing. Far from being the ordinary, charming people that Larry had promised, they all turned out to be the most extraordinary eccentrics who were so highbrow that they had difficulty in understanding one another. ~ Gerald Durrell

The medieval church imposed fast days on which sexual intercourse and the eating of flesh were forbidden, but eating "cold" foods was permitted. because fish came from water, it was deemed cold, as were waterfowl and whale, but meat was considered hot food. ~ Mark Kurlansky

In Scotland, Catholics have raised their voices against sectarianism and intolerance directed against the Church. Clearly, these actions show that freedom of religious expression, a basic human right, is not upheld in our midst as widely and as completely as it should be. ~ Keith O'Brien

Every writer at least once in his/er lifetime creates a character who loves books. ~ Himanshu Chhabra

As individuals, great writers from Villon to Diderot to Voltaire to
Rousseau to Byron or Shelley have often shown themselves to be
irresponsible, selfish, mean or sometimes even cowardly people. Their lives were drab or self destructive or reckless.
We read them for their Words, not for their deeds. ~ Max Vegaritter

Editing is such a voyeuristic treat for me. I land on a theme and ask authors to pen works that fit the topic. ~ Alison Tyler

The fact is, the great intellectuals of the western religious tradition from Augustine to Aquinas and Peter Abelard became philosophically dominant. The intellectual tradition was preserved. The great intellectuals of the Islamic tradition like Averroes and Avicenna became heretics whose influence disappeared under the weight of rote preaching and practice. Islam as a result has a moral code, a legalistic system of right and wrong, but no evolved ethical tradition. ~ R. Joseph Hoffmann

In my view, the ebook world for both established and new authors is a terrific new and exciting format. It is a format that will bring forth many new writers to publishing. ~ Robert Gottlieb

Authors can only allow readers to learn so much about their characters. As much as they try to build someone three dimensionally on a page, words are still limited and subject to imagination and interpretation ~ Heather Lyons

Genuineness is often sacrificed in order to showcase the author's control over the form and subject matter, the end result technically sound but emotionally cold. ~ Jennifer S. Davis

In my 20s, as I began to travel in Europe, I found comfort in religious paintings. Even though my own belief in Catholic dogma had been shaken and weakened, I found that the beauty and the richness of the art still held me. ~ Colm Toibin

probably the biggest complaint authors have in this brave new world is not sales (or the lack thereof) but the constant promotion that eats so much into precious writing time. ~ David Gaughran

For the Bible and the Qur'aan to be the divine word of God, they must be free from inexplicable contradictions, and there should be no doubt about their content nor about their authors... ~ Abu Ameenah Bilal Philips

Writers are not called poets just because they make words rhyme. Poets respond to an inner calling that enables them to add symmetry to mere vocabulary in such a way as to resonate beyond our minds to our souls. Poetry though, however sublime, does not end with words. The most beautiful verses are poems of affection. A hug is a poem of tenderness spoken with our arms. The act of love is a sonnet written by the passion of two authors. A newborn child is a poem of Divinity in human form; whose birth is an expression of the miracle of creation. If our perceptions are such that we do not acknowledge any of the above, perhaps we need to reestablish the link to the Poet who lives in each of us. ~ John Casperson