I have discovered, passionate grief does not link us with the dead but cuts us off from them. This becomes clearer and clearer. It is just at those moments when I feel least sorrow - getting into my morning bath is usually one of them - that H. rushes upon my mind in her full reality, her otherness. Not, as in my worst moments, all foreshortened and patheticized and solemnized by my miseries, but as she is in her own right. This is good and tonic.

Actually it seems to me that one can hardly say anything either bad enough or good enough about life.

Selfishness has never been admired.

A moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad man thinks he is alright. This is common sense really. You understand sleep when you are awake, not well you are sleeping.

The prayer preceding all prayers is 'May it be the real I who speaks. May it be the real Thou that I speak to.'

The Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ.

A concentrated mind and a sitting body make for better prayer than a kneeling body and a mind half asleep.