Because, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. Loneliness is an absolute discovery.

Isaac Watts, of course, is a hymn writer in the tradition of Congregationalism who lived in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century. He is very interesting and important because he was also a metaphysician. He knew a great deal about what was, for him, contemporary science. He was very much influenced by Isaac Newton, for example. There are planets and meteors and so on showing up in his hymns very often. But, again, the scale of his religious imagination corresponds to a very generously scaled scientific imagination.

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

I want to feel that art is an utterance made in good faith by one human being to another.

pity and charity may be at root an attempt to propitiate the dark powers that have not touched us yet.

Every spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars the mutable, and finally has come to look and not to buy.

She conceived of life as a road down which one traveled, an easy enough road through a broad country, and that one's destination was there from the very beginning, a measured distance away, standing in the ordinary light like some plain house where one went in and was greeted by respectable people and was shown to a room where everything one had ever lost or put aside was gathered together, waiting.