The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in a many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The world was new each day for God so made it daily. Yet it contained within it all the evils as before, no more, no less.

He believed in God even if he was doubtful of men's claims to know God's mind. But that a God unable to forgive was no God at all.

I tried to put things in perspective but sometimes you're just too close to it.

When you die it's the same as if everybody else did too.

Fear of an enemy can often blind men to other hazards, not least the shape which they themselves make in the world.

The night sky lies so sprent with stars that there is scarcely space of black at all and they fall all night in bitter arcs and it is so that their numbers are no less.