this is a book about something

Love, having become a god, becomes a demon.

That thing is Freedom: the gift whereby ye most resemble your Maker and are yourselves part of eternal reality.

But now I discovered the wonderful power of wine. I understood why men become drunkards. For the way it worked on me was not at all that it blotted out these sorrows, but that it made them seem glorious and noble, like sad music, and I somehow great and revered for feeling them.

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung.

The Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next.

Death and resurrection are what the story is about and had we but eyes to see it, this has been hinted on every page, met us, in some disguise, at every turn, and even been muttered in conversations between such minor characters (if they are minor characters) as the vegetables.