“One of the satisfactions of fiction is the selective order it imposes upon the confusion of a lived life.”
“Writers take words seriously — perhaps the last professional class that does.”
“Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.”
“Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe.”
“Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.”
“Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.”
“The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged to witness and experience.”
“Truth should not be forced; it should simply manifest itself.”
“Looking foolish does the spirit good.”
“Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.”
“The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.”
“Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.”
“Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.”
“Our life is a hope which is continually converting itself into memory, and memory in its turn begets hope.”
“To believe in God is to long for His existence and, further, it is to act as if He existed.”
“The intellectual world is divided into two classes — dilettantes, on the one hand, and pedants, on the other.”
“The real sin — perhaps it is a sin against the Holy Ghost for which there is no remission — is the sin of heresy, the sin of thinking for oneself.”
“There are pretenses which are very sincere, and marriage is their school.”
“May we not imagine that possibly this earthly life of ours is to the other life what sleeping is to waking? May not all our life be a dream and death an awakening?”
“It has often been said that every man who has suffered misfortunes prefers to be himself, even with his misfortunes, rather than to be someone else without them.”