The story itself should force its moral upon you. You find out what the moral is by writing the story.

You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage but He is building a palace. He intends to come & live in it Himself

The road to the promised land runs past Sinai.

Now we cannot...discover our failure to keep God's law except by trying our very hardest (and then failing). Unless we really try, whatever we say there will always be at the back of our minds the idea that if we try harder next time we shall succeed in being completely good. Thus, in one sense, the road back to God is a road of moral effort, of trying harder and harder. But in another sense it is not trying that is ever going tobring us home. All this trying leads up to the vital moment at which you turn to God and say, "You must do this. I can't.

I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, hoever, turns out to be not a state but a process.

I have seen landscapes . . . which, under a particular light, make me feel that at any moment a giant might raise his head over the next ridge.

The real trouble is that 'kindness' is a quality fatally easy to attribute to ourselves on quite inadequate grounds. Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment. Thus a man easily comes to console himself for all his other vices by a conviction that 'his heart's in the right place' and 'he wouldn't hurt a fly,' though in fact he has never made the slightest sacrifice for a fellow creature. We think we are kind when we are only happy: it is not so easy, on the same grounds, to imagine oneself temperate, chaste, or humble.