Year followed struggling year for me, and all that time I read - I suppose few have ever read so. I began, as most young people do, by reading the books I enjoyed. But I found that narrowed my pleasure.

I don't think anyone is more intrinsically holy. People experience God in many ways; and it seems to me that God does what the rest of us do: He chooses the means that best gets His message across.

All of us... when we think we are talking most intimately to someone else, are actually addressing an image we have of the person to whom we believe we speak.

There is no magic. There is only knowledge, more or less hidden.

It may be that the only reason childhood memories act on us so strongly is that, being the most remote we possess, they are the worst remembered and so offer the least resistance to that process by which we mold them nearer and nearer to an ideal which is fundamentally artistic, or at least nonfactual.

You seem to think that the only genuine existence evil can have is conscious existence - that no one is evil unless he admits it to himself. I disagree.

I was trapped in admiration for what I had once admired, as a fly in amber remains the captive of some long-vanished pine.