It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books.

The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of planting a new sun in the sky or a new primary color in the spectrum.

The difference [God's] timelessness makes is that this now (which slips away from you even as you say the word now) is for Him infinite.

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

Knock and it shall be opened.' But does knocking mean hammering and kicking the door like a maniac?

I don't want him to live forever, and I know that he's not going to live forever whether I want him to or not.