The secular world is full of holes. We have secularized badly.

What should worry us is not the number of people that oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so.

Although I don't believe in God, Bach's music shows me what a love of God must feel like.

A world where a majority had imbibed the lessons implicit within tragic art would be one in which the consequences of our failures would necessarily cease to weigh upon us so heavily.

It should not be Illiers-Combray that we visit: a genuine homage to Proust would be to look at our world through his eyes, not look at his world through our eyes.

Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.

The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.