She closed one eye and looked at me and said, “I know there is a blessing in this somewhere.
To condescend effectively it is clearly necessary to adhere to a narrow definition of relevant data.
She thought, If I or my father or any Boughton has ever stirred the Lord’s compassion, then Jack will be all right. Because perdition for him would be perdition for every one of us.
It is clearly true that the reflex of disparagement is no more compatible with rigorous inquiry than the impulse to glorify.
There’s a lot under the surface of life, everyone knows that. A lot of malice and dread and guilt, and so much loneliness, where you wouldn’t really expect to find it, either.
Anyone with one solid human bond is that smug, and it is the smugness as much as the comfort and safety that lonely people covet and admire.
For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow.
Love is holy because it is like grace – the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.
We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of it, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege.
Sometimes I have loved the peacefulness of an ordinary Sunday. It is like standing in a newly planted garden after a warm rain. You can feel the silent and invisible life.
I have found that the characters in my novels stay with me after a book has ended. I know them in some sense. I never map anything out. I just think until I am secure in the voice of one of them, and then let the character unfold.
When we did not move or speak, there was no proof that we were there at all.
I do assume that a character or a place is inexhaustible and will always reward further attention.
This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.
I am grateful for all those dark years, even though in retrospect they seem like a long, bitter prayer that was answered finally.
There’s so much to be grateful for, words are poor things.
I got four volumes of the letters and speeches of Oliver Cromwell. He is prominent among the great unread, and treated so oddly by history that I wanted to hear his side of things.
Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was.
We are part of a mystery, a splendid mystery within which we must attempt to orient ourselves if we are to have a sense of our own nature.
God does not need our worship. We worship to enlarge our sense of holy, so that we can feel and know the presense of the Lord, who is with us always. He said, Love is what it amounts to, a loftier love, and pleasure in a loving presence.