Christianity asserts that every individual human being is going to live for ever, and this must be either true or false. Now there are a good many things which would not be worth bothering about if I were going to live only seventy years, but which I had better bother about very seriously if I am going to live for ever.

The distinction between pretending you are better than you are and beginning to be better in reality is finer than moral sleuth hounds conceive.

We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.

Every contact you make with everyone you meet will help them or hinder them on their journey to heaven.

Music. A meaningless acceleration in the rhythm of celestial experience.

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing. At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.

A universe whose only claim to be believed in rests on the validity of inference must not start telling us the inference is invalid.