I entirely agree that a historian ought to be precise in detail; but unless you take all the characters and circumstances into account, you are reckoning without the facts. The proportions and relations of things are just as much facts as the things themselves.

First I believe it to be a grave mistake to present Christianity as something charming and popular with no offense inn it.

Detective stories keep alive a view of the world which ought to be true. Of course people read them for fun ... But underneath they feed a hunger for justice ... you offer to divert them, and you show them by stealth the orderly world in which we should all try to be living.

And what do all the great words come to in the end, but that? I love you - I am at rest with you - I have come home.

If men will not understand the meaning of judgement, they will never come to understand the meaning of grace.

I'm getting very old and my bones ache. My sins are deserting me, and if I could only have my time over again I'd take care to commit more of them.

Heaven deliver us, what's a poet? Something that can't go to bed without making a song about it.