Life & Wisdom Quote by Morris West

A novelist’s travel anecdote becomes a quiet manifesto about craft: notice how West doesn’t present Buddhism as exotic wisdom, but as a tool that “impressed” him because it organizes experience. The key phrase is “continuity of things.” It’s not spiritual fireworks; it’s an editing principle. Life, history, even guilt and redemption don’t resolve neatly in a third act. They recur, mutate, reappear under new names. For a writer best known for moral and institutional drama, that idea is less theology than narrative infrastructure.

The line’s conversational looseness (“quite a lot,” “one of the things”) is doing strategic work. West positions himself as a worldly observer rather than a doctrinaire believer, borrowing a concept without surrendering to it. That stance sidesteps the Western tendency to treat Eastern religion as either self-help branding or mystical spectacle. Instead, he foregrounds a single notion he can translate into story: the “wheel of life,” a metaphor sturdy enough to carry both personal cycles (desire, regret, renewal) and civilizational ones (power, collapse, reform).

The most revealing moment is “which is what we’re talking about.” West folds his listener into the wheel, implying that the subject at hand - whatever the interview topic was, likely politics, faith, or human nature - isn’t an exception. It’s another turn. The “ever turning” repetition lands like insistence: stop waiting for final answers. Pay attention to patterns, because the pattern is the plot.