It now seemed to me that all my other guesses had been only self-pleasing dreams spun out of my wishes, but now I was awake.

I think we must fully face the fact that when Christianity does not make a man very much better, it makes him very much worse... Conversion may make of one who was, if no better, no worse than an animal, something like a devil.

In silence and in meditation on the eternal truths, I hear the voice of God which excites our hearts to greater love.

Your people eat dry and tasteless flesh but it is off plates as smooth as ivory and as round as the sun.

You can’t go on “seeing through” things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. To “see through” all things is the same as not to see.

After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again. Very often what God first helps us toward is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again. For however important chastity (or courage, or truthfulness, or any other virtue) may be, this process trains us in habits of the soul which are more important still. It cures our illusions about ourselves and teaches us to depend on God. We learn, on the one hand, that we cannot trust ourselves even in our best moments, and, on the other, that we need not despair even in our worst, for our failures are forgiven.

Do not cite the Deep Magic to me, Witch. I was there when it was written.