this is a book about something

When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

Joy bursts in our lives when we go about doing the good at hand and not trying to manipulate things and times to achieve joy.

Good, as it ripens, becomes continually more different not only from evil but from other good.

How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete.

Joy is the serious business of heaven.

The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God who loves, is only insoluble so long as we attach a trivial meaning to the word "love", and look on things as if man were the centre of them. Man is not the centre. God does not exist for the sake of man. Man does not exist for his own sake. "Thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created." We were made not primarily that we may love God (though we were made for that too) but that God may love us, that we may become objects in which the divine love may rest "well pleased".