Nuns Quotes

I can't stand to see a living thing in pain, least of all Evander. The nuns who raised me said I'd been that way since birth. Trying to put the wings back on a trampled butterfly. Tending the weakest plants in their garden. That's what made me so well suited for walking in the Deadlands, they said. My love of life. ~ Sarah Glenn Marsh

People always ask me if I hate the nuns. Do I make my movies extra dirty to piss them off? I always say no, that's not the point. To a Catholic, a movie is only dirty if it makes you want to have sex more. If it makes you feel sick, disgusted, ashamed of your own body, then it's not a dirty movie at all. It's a Catholic movie. And I make very Catholic movies. ~ Kevin Smith

It is hardly lonely in a nunnery, son, with other women. And God is there."
Morgause said, "I would rather dwell in a hermitage in the forest than in a house full of chattering ladies! If God is there, it must be hard for him to get a word in edgewise! ~ Marion Zimmer Bradley

I went to an all-girls' Christian convent school run by nuns. It was fun, but when I was 15, I said, 'Mum, that's it - I need to go where there are some boys.' ~ Freida Pinto

The nuns taught me that the best thing you can do in life when things get difficult is to work. ~ Frederick Lenz

Clothes are a kind of uniform. A nun's habit, a surgeon's scrubs, a cop's uniform. People often say that when they put on a certain uniform, they actually think of themselves differently. ~ Victor LaValle

What nuns don't realize is that they look better in nun clothes than in J. C. Penney pantsuits. ~ Walker Percy

By the early fifth century, the Church that had begun as a tiny group of fishermen and other poor people meeting in modest abodes had joined the Roman trend in classical culture in becoming logocentric, relying heavily on written texts -- the Bible, the sacramental services, and the theology of the Church Fathers.
"Beginning as a movement in Egypt around 200 A.D. and reaching France by 500 A.D., a special place of holiness was attributed to monks and nuns in a monastic setting because of their celibacy. Monks often became bishops; nuns were told to stay in their convents and shut up. ~ Norman F. Cantor

I got used to birds: small black birds flying up from behind a building like God had tossed up a handful of currants, birds squalling in the parking lot of the grocery store (drowning the hum of industrial refrigerators), chachalacas -brown robed nuns to the spangled disco dancer peacocks - cackling in the dust of our yard. I got used to the chatters, squeaks, squalls, peeps, calls that sounded like bitter laughter, whistles, flutes, calls that sounded like souls ascending to heaven. I got used to dust and flatness, to sunsets like pink water pouring from the sky, flooding the earth with orange soda. I got used to wind: the hot, cruel wind of afternoon, the merciful magnolia breeze of night. I got used to it. But then I had to go. ~ Kathleen Founds

We were kept at work, and permitted to speak with each other only on such subjects as related to the Convent, and all in the hearing of the old nuns who sat by us. ~ Maria Monk

Strange, don't you think, that nuns and monks make the most sensual food and drink? ~ Megan Chance

I hope that Beyond the Robe helps you to feel closer to the monks and nuns and to better understand their immense potential to provide leadership in their world and further insight into ours. Instead of simply admiring them from afar, let's all get close enough to really listen. ~ Bobby Sager

Up to now my involvement in the Tibetan freedom struggle has been part of my spiritual practice, because the issues of the survival of the Buddha Teaching and the freedom of Tibet are very much related. In this particular struggle, there is no problem with many monks and nuns, including myself, joining. ~ Dalai Lama

We're all a bit mad at that moment, as if we've had loads to drink, though in fact we're sober as nuns. I suppose that's how rebellion feels - living with purpose - like each second is monumental and full. I soak it in, because I'm not fool enough to think it will last forever. But it's ours now, all ours. ~ Wendy Higgins

I was born of heterosexual parents. I was taught by heterosexual teachers in a fiercely heterosexual society. Television ads and newspaper ads - fiercely heterosexual. A society that puts down homosexuality. And why am I a homosexual if I'm affected by role models? I should have been a heterosexual. And no offense meant, but if teachers are going to affect you as role models, there'd be a lot of nuns running around the streets today. ~ Harvey Milk

Wishbone

Half-eaten chicken
lying on white serving plate
quartered potatoes
chunks of carrots
celery too
we tell stories
and laugh about the day
your little finger is locked around the wishbone
so is mine
I pretend to make a wish
close my eyes
mumbling my lips
that's the way I faked out the nuns
pretending to say the rosary
so they would leave me alone
your face is so determined
you win the wrestling match
lifting your piece of chicken bone above your head
in victory
I know better than to ask
what did you wish for
secret desires of the heart are not to be shared
or
they won't come true
everyone knows that
you clean the dishes
I turn on the TV
lying on the couch
listening to you make music
with running water
and closing cupboard doors. ~ Robert Hobkirk

There was plenty of dysfunction in my family and I went to Catholic School with these psychotic nuns. I would always try to be funny to lighten the mood. ~ Julie Brown

Listen, Mike, I don't know what happens in parochial schools - most of the guys survive the nuns and come out with a sense of humor - some a little more tasteful than yours, but humor nonetheless. This guy came out like Mother Superior himself, with a stick up his ass that should have punctured his brain by now ~ Linda Fairstein

Rush Limbaugh, we expect nonsense from him. But the Vatican, that's another story. When the Vatican is so threatened that it launches attacks on nuns, well, you know what they say in politics, a hit dog hollers. ~ Jennifer Granholm

I wasn't a class clown, because my parents were very strict and because nuns in general have no sense of humor. I mean zero, zip, nada. I wasted some of my best stuff on those old hags! Look at these knuckles - those are ruler marks, and they're still visible all these years later. But I could usually get out of trouble at home if I could get my mom laughing. That's a huge ace up your sleeve as a kid. ~ Dan Alatorre

Unfortunately, in America, babies are not found in cola cans. I asked my mother when I was four, and she said they came from eggs laid by rabbis. If you aren't Jewish, they're laid by Catholic nuns. If you're an atheist, they're laid by dirty, lonely prostitutes. ~ Max Jerry Horovitz

The only part of the evening I really enjoyed was when Lord Pomtinius told me a limerick about an adulterous abbot."
"Don't you dare repeat it!" her sister ordered. Georgiana had never shown the faintest wish to rebel against the rules of propriety. She loved and lived by them.
"There once was an adulterous abbot," Olivia teased, "as randy-"
Georgiana slapped her hands over her ears. "I can't believe he told you such a thing! Father would be furious if he knew."
"Lord Pomtinius was in his cups," Olivia said. "Besides, he's ninety-six and he doesn't care about decorum any longer. Just a laugh, now and then."
"It doesn't even make sense. An adulterous abbot? How can an abbot be adulterous? They don't even marry."
"Let me know if you want to hear the whole verse," Olivia said. "It ends with talk of nuns, so I believe the word was being used loosely. ~ Eloisa James

the seventeenth-century saint, Margaret Marie Alacoque, a French nun of Parayle-Monial, who founded the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Margaret would deliberately eat cheese knowing that it made her vomit, and by her own admission she ate the vomit of sister nuns. ~ John Cornwell

The poet Robert Browning caused considerable consternation by including the word twat in one of his poems, thinking it an innocent term. The work was Pippa Passes, written in 1841 and now remembered for the line "God's in His heaven, all's right with the world." But it also contains this disconcerting passage:
Then owls and bats
Cowls and twats
Monks and nuns in a cloister's moods,
Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry!
Browning had apparently somewhere come across the word twat
which meant precisely the same then as it does now
but pronounced it with a flat a and somehow took it to mean a piece of headgear for nuns. The verse became a source of twittering amusement for generations of schoolboys and a perennial embarrassment to their elders, but the word was never altered and Browning was allowed to live out his life in wholesome ignorance because no one could think of a suitably delicate way of explaining his mistake to him. ~ Bill Bryson

Pray stop your infernal whispering. You sound like a pack of nuns planning a murder. ~ Karen Hawkins

It is odd that neither the Church nor modern public opinion condemns petting, provided it stops short at a certain point. At what point sin begins is a matter as to which casuists differ. One eminently orthodox Catholic divine laid it down that a confessor may fondle a nun's breasts, provided he does it without evil intent. But I doubt whether modern authorities would agree with him on this point. ~ Bertrand Russell

They say, "Why do you call God 'She'?"
Eve says, "God is neither woman nor man but both these things. But now She has come to show us a new side to Her face, one we have ignored for too long."
They say, "But what about Jesus?"
Eve says, "Jesus is the son. But the son comes from the mother. Consider this: which is greater, God or the world?"
They say, for they have learned this already from the nuns, "God is greater, because God created the world."
Eve says, "So the one who creates is greater than the thing created?"
They say, "It must be so."
Then Eve says, "So which must be greater, the Mother or the Son? ~ Naomi Alderman

Who knows what light housework means? One nun's light could be another nun's penal servitude. ~ Maeve Binchy

Well, OK then." He narrowed his eyes. "How about you? Do you have any ... romances I should know about?"
"Nope. Not one."
"Well, good. Excellent. There'll be plenty of time for boys when you leave college and become a nun."
She smiled. "I'm glad you have such ambitious dreams for me. ~ Derek Landy

I still have a problem with nuns. I follow them around like a kitten with a ball of yarn. After a while, all my characters become very close friends. ~ Meg Tilly

A simple love-story,' said David piously, 'about a girl that loves a man frightfully and he is married, so she goes and lives with him, and then his wife is very ill and going to die, so the girl and the man both offer themselves for blood transfusion in a very noble way without each other knowing. But only one of them has the right kind of blood and I can't decide which. Do you think it would be more pathetic if the girl gave her blood and died, and then the man went off into the desert to be a monk, or if the man died and the wife and the girl made friends over his corpse and both became nuns? One might do good business with that, because in films no one much cares if the hero lives or dies so long as there are plenty of lovely heroines.' 'How ~ Angela Thirkell

It so happens that this is particular love was precisely the sort best suited to the state of her soul. It was a sort of remote worship, a mute contemplation, a deification by an unknown votary. It was the apprehension of adolescence by adolescence, her dreams becoming romance ad remain in dream, the wished-for phantom realized at last and made flash, but still without name or wrong or fault, or need, or defect; in a word, a lover distant and ideal, a chimera having form. Any closer and more palpable encounter at this first stage would have terrified Cosette, still half buried in the magnifying mirage of the cloister. She had all the terrors of children and all the terrors of nuns mingled. The spirit of the convent, in which she had been steeped for five years, was still evaporating from her whole person, and made everything tremulous around her. In this condition, it was not a lover she needed, it was not even an admirer, it was a vision. She began to adore Marius as something charming, luminous, and impossible. ~ Victor Hugo

I had a long talk with my dear Fat Mary that night, because I had many questions. Could someone actually be beaten to death by such a nun? Did Mother Rufina, the new Superior, know that Sister Clotilda was so cruel? Who let her work with children? Could nuns go to hell?
Fat Mary told me she didn't know the answers to my questions, but she reminded me that it was her role to take my worries and burdens and keep them for me until a time when I could understand them. ~ Maria Nhambu

(Brett) "Making friends?"
She jerked, then her spine straightened into posture nuns would be proud of and she turned her head. "He's hard to resist, really." Another belly rub. "You're late."
He crouched down to sit on his heels, and his knees spanned to either side of her arms. Reaching around, he scratched Beans behind the ears. Brett was positive the dog actually sighed with happiness. "I've been here, just didn't think to look for you on the floor. ~ Jeanette Murray

St. Seraphim, like Francis of Assisi, talked to animals. One day two nuns saw him deep in conversation with a bear. The bears of the Russian forests are very ferocious, and the two women were terrified. But Seraphim reassured them and showed them that he who is sanctified lives in peace with all creation, just as Adam did before the Fall. ~ Olivier Clement

I doubt if we nuns are really as self-sacrificing as we must seem to be to you who live in the world. We don't give everything for nothing, you know. The mystery plays fair. ~ Elizabeth Goudge

There are women who love their husbands as blindly, as enthusiastically, and as enigmatically as nuns their cloister. ~ Marie Von Ebner-Eschenbach

If there is anyone who's living the work of the New Testament, it's the nuns of the Catholic church and not the Catholic hierarchy. ~ Anna Quindlen

I became a writer not because my father was one - my father made false teeth for a living. I became a writer because the Irish nuns who educated me taught me something about bravery with their willingness to give so much to me. ~ Richard Rodriguez

The weight of what had transpired on this day finally settled on Ciro. This wasn't really their home, and the nuns weren't truly family. The security they had provided was only on loan. ~ Adriana Trigiani

Audry Hepburn on the cover of The Nun's Story was staring up at me from my unmade bed. Her hair was hidden by her snow-white wimple; her big eyes looked frightened.
"What are you looking at?" I said. "Fuck you." It was the first time I'd ever said the word. I felt a brief shiver of power.
Then I sat back on the bed and sobbed. Dolores Price: Lady of Sorrow. ~ Wally Lamb

She had once told him that as soon as you placed your hands upon a stranger, they begin to talk. Everybody found it so, she said: hairdressers, nurses, nuns. It was dangerously easy to give in: human defences dissovled at another person's touch. ~ Charlotte Wood

Even the nuns went racist after the convent was reappraised and it seemed their pension fund was in jeopardy. ~ George Saunders

Are you okay?" asked Finisterre.
"Annoyed," I said, giving him my hand so he could heave me to my feet.
"Yes, I should imagine being attacked by a nun might be annoying. ~ Jasper Fforde

But the blessed Bishop of Geneva taught his nuns another kind of prayer, which even the sick can make: to remain peacefully in the presence of God, manifesting our needs to Him with no other mental effort, like a poor person who uncovers his sores and by this means is more effective in inciting passers-by to do him some good than if he wore himself out trying to convince them of his need. ~ Vincent De Paul

It was a bad one, the Winter of 1933. Wading home that night through flames of snow, my toes burning, my ears on fire, the snow swirling around me like a flock of angry nuns, I stopped dead in my tracks. The time had come to take stock. Fair weather or foul, certain forces in the world were at work trying to destroy me. ~ John Fante

Nuns freak me out. ~ P.C. Cast

There are techniques of Buddhism, such as meditation, that anyone can adopt. And, of course, there are Christian monks and nuns who already use Buddhist methods in order to develop their devotion, compassion, and ability to forgive. ~ Dalai Lama

None of us got where we are solely by pulling ourselves up
by our bootstraps. We got here because somebody -
a parent, a teacher, an Ivy League crony or a few nuns -
bent down and helped us pick up our boots. ~ Thurgood Marshall

Who is secure in all his basic needs? Who has work, spiritual care, medical care, housing, food, occasional entertainment, free clothing, free burial, free everything? The answer might be nuns and monks, but the standard reply is 'prisoners'. ~ Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

I grew up in a house without many books. The books the nuns made us read in school didn't interest me. ~ John Dufresne

The God you imagine looks like Father Brennan, the man who baptized you: tall and Irish, with white hair and kind blue eyes, shooting a basketball in black vestments on the parish playground. The Virgin is one of the nuns who ran the adjoining schoolhouse: a spinster with a downy chin, her veil a habit. Old and sacred words, they taught you. You would not invent your own any more than you would try to build your own cathedral. Bead by bead, you whisper the same words Saint Peter spoke in Rome, the same words spoken today by all believers in São Paulo and Boston and Limerick and Cebu. ~ Mia Alvar

I have just read a long novel by Henry James. Much of it made me think of the priest condemned for a long space to confess nuns. ~ W.B.Yeats

Patches are a nun's jewels. ~ Marie Angelique Arnauld

When I was 13, I entered the seminary in the hope of becoming a priest. But I often found myself helping the nuns in the kitchen and thus discovered my passion for cooking. I began to cultivate my skills and aspirations at the age of 15, when I embarked on my first apprenticeship. ~ Joel Robuchon

That feeling stayed with me for months. In fact, I had grown so accustomed to that floating feeling that I started to panic at the prospect of losing it. So I began to ask friends, theologians, historians, pastors I knew, nuns I liked, *What am I going to do when it's gone?* And they knew exactly what I meant because they had either felt it themselves or read about it in great works of Christian theology. St. Augustine called it "the sweetness." Thomas Aquinas called it something mystical like "the prophetic light." But all said yes, it will go. The feelings will go. The sense of God's presence will go. There will be no lasting proof that God exists. There will be no formula for how to get it back.
But they offered me this small bit of certainty, and I clung to it. When the feelings recede like the tides, they said, they will leave an imprint. I would somehow be marked by the presence of an unbidden God. ~ Kate Bowler

Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room; And hermits are contented with their cells. ~ William Wordsworth

People are quite clear in viewing nuns as the servants and the teachers and the supporters of the poor. You contrast that with the fact that the Vatican did virtually nothing about long-known pedophiles, and it's just too much. ~ Gloria Steinem

A number of girls of my acquaintance went to school to the nuns of the Congregational Nunnery, or Sisters of Charity, as they are sometimes called. ~ Maria Monk

Women he said in disgust. I wasn't sure whether we was referring to me or nuns. ~ Janette Rallison

Nuns are great, but they aren't priests. Nuns can't celebrate Mass. They can't hear confessions or consecrate the Eucharist. They can't become bishops or cardinals or popes, they can't become the people who make the big decisions. How do you change a church that doesn't listen to you? ~ Katie Henry

Thank you." Lib tried to think of some more conversational note to end on. "It's always intrigued me," she said, letting her voice rise, "why you Sisters of Mercy are called walking nuns." "We walk out into the world, you see, Mrs. Wright. We take the usual vows of any order - poverty, chastity, obedience - but also a fourth, service." Lib had never heard the nun say so much before. "What kind of service?" Anna broke in: "To the sick, the poor, and the ignorant." "Well remembered, child," said the nun. "We vow to be of use." As ~ Emma Donoghue

It's funny to hear priests and nuns argue with each other. ~ Wendelin Van Draanen

Old age is a disease from which there is no recovery but the old nun's recent attack had certainly been brought on chiefly by the fatigue of so much travelling. ~ Murasaki Shikibu

The Catholic Church wants to see child abuse by priests and nuns as simply an issue of some very bad priests and nuns. What it needs to understand is that the nature of religion compounded the problem. It allowed priests to have a status that placed them above suspicion. It fostered a myth that celibacy meant purity. It had schools that enforced authority by beating children and taught that authority figures should not be questioned. Men like Smyth and Steele will have understood the esteem in which priests were held and seen themselves as untouchable. They had every reason to, as the Catholic Church did a great deal to defend and enable them. ~ Noel McGivern

When boys called Bob and Bono would bring their own wild-rhythm celebration and the world would fall down in worshipful hallelujahs as it again acknowledged Ireland's capacity to create missionaries. So what if they were "the boys in the band"? They sang from a pulpit, an enormous pulpit looking down on a congregation that would knock your eyes out. A city that had produced Joyce and Beckett and Yeats, a country that had produced poet-heroes and more priests and nuns per head of population than almost any on earth was not going to spawn boys who just wanted to stand before a packed hall of gyrating teenagers and strum their guitars and sing. They had to have a message. One of salvation; they were in it to save the world. Like I said, we're teachers, missionaries. ~ Josephine Hart

War crimes, you say?

No matter how many policies you put on paper, in reality, there are no rights and wrongs in war. War itself is a crime. War cannot be justified.

I believe, the only people, in this world, whose opinions matter, are the ones who go the extra mile to help other people expecting nothing in return.

Soldiers who fight fiercely for their country, the doctors in Sri Lanka's public hospitals attending to hundreds of patients at a time for no extra pay , the nuns who voluntarily teach English and math to children of refugee camps in the north, the monks who collect food to feed entire villages during crises, they are the people worth listening to, their opinion matters.

So find me one of them who will say: they wish the war didn't end in 2009, that they wish Sri Lanka was divided into two parts. Find me one of them who agrees with the international war crime allegations against Sri Lanka, and I will listen.

But I will not listen to the opinions of those who are paid to find faults in a war they were never a part of, a war they never experienced themselves. I will not listen to the opinions of those who watched the war on tv or read about it on the internet or were moved by a documentary on Al Jazeera.

The war is over. The damage is done. Let Sri Lanka move on. So our children will never have to see what we've seen. ~ Thisuri Wanniarachchi

She wore black, the color of nuns and witches, the color of the loneliest corners of outer space, where gravity prevents all light from escaping, the name given to boxes tucked into airplanes, the ones that explain the disaster. ~ Lili Wright

I admire certain priests and nuns who go off on their own and do God's work on their own, who help in the ghettos, but as far as the institution of the church is concerned, I think it is despicable. ~ Frank McCourt

It is ironic that Mr. Berger learned of this espionage in exactly the same month that Mr. Gore was attending his now famous fund-raiser with Buddhist nuns in Southern California. ~ Lamar Alexander

When we were starting our community a bunch of older Benedictine nuns said to us, "If you have any questions or want to pick our brains, please do - we've been doing community for about 1,500 years together so we've learned a few things." ~ Shane Claiborne

Ha! Easy for nuns to talk about giving up things. That's what they do for a living. ~ Garrison Keillor

When does a job feel meaningful? Whenever it allows us to generate delight or reduce suffering in others. Though we are often taught to think of ourselves as inherently selfish, the longing to act meaningfully in our work seems just as stubborn a part of our make-up as our appetite for status or money. It is because we are meaning-focused animals rather than simply materialistic ones that we can reasonably contemplate surrendering security for a career helping to bring drinking water to rural Malawi or might quit a job in consumer goods for one in cardiac nursing, aware that when it comes to improving the human condition a well-controlled defibrillator has the edge over even the finest biscuit.

But we should be wary of restricting the idea of meaningful work too tightly, of focusing only on the doctors, the nuns of Kolkata or the Old Masters. There can be less exalted ways to contribute to the furtherance of the collective good....

....An endeavor endowed with meaning may appear meaningful only when it proceeds briskly in the hands of a restricted number of actors and therefore where particular workers can make an imaginative connection between what they have done with their working days and their impact upon others. ~ Alain De Botton

Crossing the square at Saint-Sulpice, he split through a stream of nuns, who, as insects interrupted, lost the scent of their paths and spun away in eddies. ~ Patrick DeWitt

All nuns, by the very fact of their monastic profession, are exceptional people. No ordinary woman could live such a life. There must inevitably be something, or many things, that are outstanding about a nun. ~ Jennifer Worth

I kick kittens. I made rude gestures at nuns. ~ Cassandra Clare

Going to Catholic school was what fueled me into comedy. The nuns were so brutal so I used to try to make my friends laugh. ~ Julie Brown

The girls changing in the gym watched her from the other side of the room the first time she went in, and one of the nuns was sitting there as well, just because Stella was there. They took her into a meeting in school and she had to say in advance that she wasn't a lesbian, or they wouldn't have let her even try to use the girls' changing room. They asked her if she was still a Christian. She explained that her family are not religious. They asked her what she knew of damnation. She asked them what they knew of autonomy. They asked her how she knew that word. She asked if they had met her mother. They said they would pray for her. She said it was not necessary. They asked if she might feel different in a few months, or if perhaps she would simply change for gym in the janitor's cupboard. She said she'd felt like this her whole life and no amount of praying was going to change it and she could use the janitor's cupboard to change, but she was a person, not a broom. They said she needed to find Jesus. She asked if it was like finding Wally? Only one nun knew what she meant. That little drawing in those old comic strips her mum had, when you look for the dweeby guy in the stripy hat. ~ Jenni Fagan

Italy still has a provincial sophistication that comes from its long history as a collection of city states. That, combined with a hot climate, means that the Italians occupy their streets and squares with much greater ease than the English. The resultant street life is very rich, even in small towns like Arezzo and Gaiole, fertile ground for the peeping Tom aspect of an actor's preparation. I took many trips to Siena, and was struck by its beauty, but also by the beauty of the Siennese themselves. They are dark, fierce, and aristocratic, very different to the much paler Venetians or Florentines. They have always looked like this, as the paintings of their ancestors testify. I observed the groups of young people, the lounging grace with which they wore their clothes, their sense of always being on show. I walked the streets, they paraded them. It did not matter that I do not speak a word of Italian; I made up stories about them, and took surreptitious photographs. I was in Siena on the final day of the Palio, a lengthy festival ending in a horse race around the main square. Each district is represented by a horse and jockey and a pair of flag-bearers. The day is spent by teams of supporters with drums, banners, and ceremonial horse and rider processing round the town singing a strange chanting song. Outside the Cathedral, watched from a high window by a smiling Cardinal and a group of nuns, with a huge crowd in the Cathedral Square itself, the supporters passed, and to drum r ~ Roger Allam

Understanding dawned about the sequence of the last two lines, and with it came a sudden mental image of him doing that to me.
A flush scorched my cheeks in the next instant. Mortified, I snatched my hands away and stood so abruptly the chair fell over.
Taunting laughter followed me.
"Oh, Kitten, you were doing so well! Guess you just couldn't pass up a nice stroll in the woods. Beautiful night for it, I smell a storm coming. And you wonder why I had you pegged as an innocent. I've met nuns who were more promiscuous. I knew it would be the oral stuff that did you in, I would have bet my life on it."
"You don't have a life, you're dead."
I was trying to remind myself of that. Listening to his explicit detailing of everything he could do to me - not that I would ever let him, of course! - had made that a hard point to remember. I shook my head, trying to clear it of the images dancing in it. ~ Jeaniene Frost

I loved nuns when I was growing up. I thought they were beautiful. For several years I wanted to be a nun. I saw them as really pure, disciplined, above average people. They had these serene faces. Nuns are sexy. ~ Madonna Ciccone

I was only beginning to enter into the infinite subtlety of Gregorian chant. It was - and remains - the only public prayer I have ever been able to engage in without feeling like a phony and a jackass. But then, one day in 1965 or so, it was simply abolished. With a stroke of his pen, Pope John XXIII - who had such good ideas about other things - declared that liturgy would henceforth be in the vernacular language of the people. That was, effectively, the end of Latin chant.

Then all those monks and nuns who had devoted hours and hours a day began to sicken and fall into depressions, but nobody noticed for a long time. Maybe, as I can well believe, the music toned up their systems in some mysterious way. Or perhaps chant really was a language that God understood. Faced with numerous liturgical scholas shrieking away in the new vernacular hymns, Divinity may have covered its ears and withdrawn, leaving the monks to pine. We parish musicians, illiterate in anything written after the 13th century, stumbled around trying to score liturgies for guitar and bongo drums, trying to make sense of texts like "Eat his body! Drink his blood!"

It wasn't because the music got so bad that I quit going to Mass, but it certainly was the beginning of my doubts about papal infallibility. ~ Mary Rose O'Reilley

You see, you and I are the only people here who walk quite quietly and peaceably on solid ground. The nuns walk in heaven and your husband
in darkness. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

... do you truly expect that the two of us are going to share a bed tonight- and tomorrow night- as chastely as a pair of nuns on holiday?"
"That will pose no difficulty for me," Evie said gingerly, conscious that she was delivering an insult of the highest order. ~ Lisa Kleypas

Well he should get over himself. He tried to get me burned at the stake in Brit History yesterday. Here I am minding my own business like a good little girl, and out of the blue Tucker raises his hand and accuses me of being a witch"
"sounds like something Tucker would do" admits wendy.
"Everybody had to vote on it. I barely escaped with my nuns life. Obviously I'll have to return the favour. ~ Cynthia Hand

Even as a small child, I wondered why the Dominican nuns who educated me were subservient to the Jesuit priests who educated my brothers. ~ Janine Di Giovanni

I attended Catholic school. We received a great education from the nuns ... Also, guilt. Guilt and a feeling of never being satisfied with what you've done. And a sense that you are inadequate and a big phony. All useful for a writer. I'm always being edited by my inner nun. ~ George Saunders

Lip-chewed debtors rich in excuses; heard-it-all creditors tightening nooses; prisoners haunted by happier lives and ageing rakes by other men's wives; skeletal tutors goaded to fits; firemen-turned-looters when occasion permits; tongue-tied witnesses; purchased judges; mothers-in-law nurturing briars and grudges; apothecaries grinding powders with mortars; palanquins carrying not-yet-wed daughters; silent nuns; nine-year-old whores; the once-were-beautiful gnawed by sores; ~ David Mitchell

I was brought up Catholic. I'm lapsed. From the age of three I was with the nuns. Now I'm an atheist. ~ Paul Bettany

I am the sum of all somes, with a few scattered nones and nuns thrown in (though I didn't throw the nuns in, as I don't condone violence). ~ Jarod Kintz

Good priests never look for awards and, perversely enough in the clerical culture universe, do not receive many. Like the aged nuns who taught selflessly and nearly anonymously all their lives, these servants of the People of God only get into the papers when their obituaries are printed. ~ Eugene Kennedy

Holy mother of whoring nuns she's hot. Fuck! I haven't just crossed the border into boner territory, Mr Happy's erected a tent from my jeans and is setting up camp there. ~ Carmen Jenner

The two sisters wouldn't sleep with me. But it's cool, because they were nuns, and I didn't have my clerical costume on. ~ Jarod Kintz

But are you glad you went to college? Was it a good experience?"
I suppose it was. Althought I can't remember a single thing I learned. Except for Latin, and that's only because the nuns literally beat it into us and I use it sometimes for the crossword."
There were nuns at Radcliffe?"
Yes, it was all nuns."
Are you sure? At Radcliffe?"
Maybe it was high school."
But you aren't Catholic," I said. "I don't think you ever went to a parochial school."
Well, I distinctly remember nuns with sticks walking up and down the aisles as we recited Latin. Maybe it was a show I was in, but I doubt it because nuns don't beat children in musicals. ~ Peter Cameron

I don't allow flying nuns in my convent," she said. "They tend to be frivolous, and during night flight, they're prone to crashing through windows. ~ Dean Koontz

Thomas nodded towards Keane. 'He doesn't want to be a priest and you don't want to be a monk. Now you're both Hellequin.'
Brother Michael looked disbelieving. 'I am?' He asked excitedly.
'You are,' Thomas said.
'So all we need now is a pair of ripe young girls who don't want to be nuns,' Keane said cheerfully. ~ Bernard Cornwell

I'm a detective, but nuns could stonewall Sam Spade into an asylum ~ Dennis Lehane

Growing up in an old-fashioned Bengali Hindu family and going to a convent school run by stern Irish nuns, I was brought up to revere rules. Without rules, there was only anarchy. ~ Bharati Mukherjee

Everybody knows that the soul of a cat is formed from the composite souls of nine debauched nuns who failed in their vows. ~ Barry Hughart

I go to the favelas in Brazil. It's the same in the South Side of Chicago. It's the same, or just more violent. We're trying to get them to stop selling dope. You see kids with AK-47s, and nine-year-olds with nine millimeters. You know, they don't play. They make us look like nuns. ~ Quincy Jones