Boughton says he has more ideas about heaven every day. He said, "Mainly I just think about the splendors of the world and multiply by two. I'd multiply by ten or twelve if I had the energy.

I hated waiting. If I had one particular complaint, it was that my life seemed composed entirely of expectation. I expected — an arrival, an explanation, an apology. There had never been one, a fact I could have accepted, were it not true that, just when I had got used to the limits and dimensions of one moment, I was expelled into the next and made to wonder again if any shapes hid in its shadows.

When my mother left me waiting for her, [she] established in me the habit of waiting and expectation which makes any present moment most significant for what it does not contain.

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

The great truth that is too often forgotten is that it is in the nature of people to do good to one another.

I really can't claim ever to have had an exceptionally close relationship with a minister. I'm always there. I pay my pledge. I listen and observe with interest. I'm very sympathetic with the rigor and the aesthetic quality of what they do. Aside from that, I don't have a kind of personal experience with any of them that I could consider privileged, so to speak.

The old man always said we should attend to the things we have some hope of understanding, and eternity isn't one of them. Well, this world isn't one either.