You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.

No one knew about the squirrel’s skull beneath Briony bed, but no one wanted to know.

She lay in the dark and knew everything.

No one knows anything, really. It's all rented, or borrowed.

The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.

And though you think the world is at your feet, it can rise up and tread on you.

I'm not against religion in the sense that I feel I can't tolerate it, but I think written into the rubric of religion is the certainty of its own truth. And since there are 6,000 religions currently on the face of the earth, they can't all be right. And only the secular spirit can guarantee those freedoms and it's the secular spirit that they contest.