It began to drizzle rain and he turned on the windshield wipers; they made a great clatter like two idiots clapping in church.

I am not afraid that the book will be controversial, I'm afraid it will not be controversial.

One of the effects of modern liberal Protestantism has been gradually to turn religion into poetry and therapy, to make truth vaguer and vaguer and more and more relative, to banish intellectual distinctions, to depend on feeling instead of thought, and gradually to come to believe that God has no power, that he cannot communicate with us, cannot reveal himself to us, indeed has not done so, and that religion is our own sweet invention.

Total non-retention has kept my education from being a burden to me.

St. Cyril of Jerusalem, in instructing catechumens, wrote: “The dragon sits by the side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the Father of Souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon.” No matter what form the dragon may take, it is of this mysterious passage past him, or into his jaws, that stories of any depth will always be concerned to tell, and this being the case, it requires considerable courage at any time, in any country, not to turn away from the storyteller.

Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.

I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil.