If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records, that though He has often rebuked us and condemned us, He has never regarded us with contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.

When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

We must lay before him what is in us; not what ought to be in us.

Oh God, God, why did you take such trouble to force this creature out of its shell if it is now doomed to crawl back -- to be sucked back -- into it?

If you picture Time as a straight line along which we have to travel, then you must think of God as the whole page on which the line is drawn.

Joy is the serious business of heaven. Our merriment must be between people who take each other seriously.

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