God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when he catches us, as it were, off our guard.

A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered.

The salvation of a single soul is more important than the production or preservation of all the epics and tragedies in the world.

All is summed up in the prayer which a young female human is said to have uttered recently: "O God, make me a normal twentieth-century girl!" Thanks to our labors, this will mean increasingly: "Make me a minx, a moron, and a parasite.

And that's why, when they want to get rid of anyone, they usually bring him down here (like they were doing with me) and say they'll leave him to the ghosts. But I always wondered if they didn't really drown 'em or cut their throats. I never quite believed in the ghosts. But those two cowards you've just shot believed all right. They were more scared of taking me to my death than I was of going.

We do not want to merely “see” beauty. We want to be united with it, to receive it into ourselves, to become part of it.

Tribulations cannot cease until God either sees us remade or sees that our remaking is now hopeless.