Because, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. Loneliness is an absolute discovery.
A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.
I owe everything that I have done to the fact that I am very much at ease being alone.
Most institutions of higher learning in the West were founded by and for religious denominations. The supposed alienation of education and faith is a recent phenomenon. At the same time, neither education nor the lack of it predisposes one to faith.
It’s not a man’s working hours that is important, it is how he spends his leisure time.
These people who can see right through you never quite do you justice, because they never give you credit for the effort you’re making to be better than you actually are, which is difficult and well meant and deserving of some little notice.
I can’t believe we will forget our sorrows altogether. That would mean forgetting that we had lived, humanly speaking. Sorrow seems to me to be a great part of the substance of human life.
I think the essence of family is that you have to agree to it, and then supply, out of your imagination and capacity for loyalty, the contents of it.
I was read to as a small child, I read on my own as soon as I could, and I recall being more or less overwhelmed again and again – if not by what the books actually said, by what they suggested, what they helped me to imagine.
Salvation was universally considered to be much more becoming in women than in men.
It is hardship that makes clear who the “fighters” are.
The locus of the human mystery is perception of this world. From it proceeds every thought, every art.
That is to say, I pray for you. And there’s an intimacy in it. That’s the truth.
I do have an impulse to sort of leverage what I say against something I disagree with.
I am delighted if people find that kind of sustenance in novels, but perhaps it’s because they don’t read the Scripture that they are comparing it to, which would perhaps provide deeper sustenance than many contemporary novels.
We inhabit, we are part of, a reality for which explanation is much too poor and small.
You have to live with your mind your whole life.
The mind has a complex life that can seem quite autonomous – dreams, obsessions, unwilled memory are all instances of this.
Fiction that does not acknowledge this at least tacitly is not true.
For me writing has always felt like praying even when I wasn’t writing prayers.