Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.

They are hypocrites, they think the Church is a cage to keep God in, so he will stay locked up there and not go wandering about the earth during the week, poking his nose into their business, and looking in the depths and darkness and doubleness of their hearts, and their lack of true charity; and they believed they need only be bothered about him on Sundays when they have their best clothes on and their faces straight, and their hands washed and their gloves on, and their stories all prepared.

There are some women who seem to be born without fear, just as there are people who are born without the ability to feel pain. The painless ones go around putting their hands on hot stoves, freezing their feet to the point of gangrene, scalding the lining of their throats with boiling coffee, because there is no warning anguish. Evolution does not favour them. So too perhaps with the fearless women, because there aren't very many of them around. ... Providence appears to protect such women, maybe out of astonishment.

Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.

A man is just a woman's strategy for making other women.

If you DJ reality, that is, if you make a mash-up of actual reality, you're going to end up with something that inevitably people will say, "This is feminist." Because you cannot avoid that.

You say, The sensed absence of God and the sensed presence amount to much the same thing, only in reverse.