Drag your thoughts away from your troubles... by the ears, by the heels, or any other way you can manage it.

Experience, the only logic sure to convince a diseased imagination and restore it to rugged health.

There is nothing more awe-inspiring than a miracle except the credulity that can take it at par.

The Bible is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies. This Bible is built mainly out of fragments of older Bibles that had their day and crumbled to ruin. So it noticeably lacks in originality, necessarily. Its three or four most imposing and impressive events all happened in earlier Bibles; there are only two new things in it: hell, for one, and that singular heaven I have told you about.

Narrative should flow as flows the brook down through the hills and the leafy woodlands...a brook that never goes straight for a minute, but goes and goes briskly, sometimes ungrammatically, and sometimes fetching a horseshoe of ¾ of a mile around and at the end of the circuit flowing within a yard of the path that it traversed an hour before; but always going and always following at least one law, always loyal to that law, the law of narrative, which has no law. Nothing to do but make the trip; the how of it is not important, so that the trip is made.

I like the truth sometimes, but I don't care enough for it to hanker after it.

All people have had ill luck, but Jairus's daughter and Lazarus had the worst.