Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic un-interestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we're dead we're dead?

It is not enough for a story to flow. It has to kind of trickle and glint as it crosses over the stones of the bare facts.

The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.

How circumstantial reality is! Facts are like individual letters, with their spikes and loops and thorns, that make up words: eventually they hurt our eyes, and we long to take a bath, to rake the lawn, to look at the sea.

It's not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain.

...but with his mother there's no question of liking him they're not even in a way separate people he began in her stomach and if she gave him life she can take it away and if he feels that withdrawal it will be the grave itself.

Atrocity is truly emperor; All things that thrive are slaves of cruel Creation.