Life & Wisdom Quote by Morris West

West’s move is to start with the most ordinary scene possible - a window view of trees and birds - and then quietly detonate it into metaphysics. Calling it “a cosmos” doesn’t inflate the moment so much as re-scale the self: the human “I” is reduced to “one small corner,” which is precisely the point. The wonder here isn’t triumphal; it’s corrective. He’s pushing against the modern habit of treating the world as backdrop and the self as protagonist.

The subtext sharpens when he adds, “I didn’t ask to be put here.” That line carries the faint chill of existentialism: existence arrives without consent, without a preface or instruction manual. But West doesn’t stay in complaint or nihilism. He pivots to “I’ve been lucky,” turning contingency into gratitude rather than grievance. Luck, in his phrasing, isn’t a lottery win; it’s the baseline astonishment of finding yourself alive at all.

Context matters: West was a 20th-century Catholic-turned-restless moral novelist, writing in the shadow of world war, institutional authority, and ideological certainty cracking apart. This quote reads like a private creed for an era skeptical of grand narratives. He offers a modest alternative: meaning not as a system you inherit, but as attention you practice. The window becomes an ethical instrument - a reminder that belonging to the world is more plausible, and more humane, than trying to dominate it.