This morning the world by moonlight seemed to be an immemorial acquaintance I had always meant to befriend. If there was ever a chance, it had passed. Strange to say, I feel a little that way about myself.

The locus of the human mystery is perception of this world. From it proceeds every thought, every art.

[John] Calvin treats experience as essentially visionary and revelatory from moment to moment, addressed to the individual perceiver, the individual soul. Where this is assumed preconceptions can only distract and obscure, though, of course, as human beings we can never wholly free ourselves of them.

It is a good thing to know what it is to be poor, and a better thing if you can do it in company.

Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was.

I have found that the characters in my novels stay with me after a book has ended. I know them in some sense. I never map anything out. I just think until I am secure in the voice of one of them, and then let the character unfold.

I think the attempt to defend belief can unsettle it, in fact, because there is always an inadequacy in argument about ultimate things.