the first quality of an honest man is contempt for religion, which would have us afraid of the most natural thing in the world, which is death; and would have us hate the one beautiful thing destiny has given us, which is life.

There are two kinds of friendship: one is genuine affection, the other is inability to refuse.

And when someone suggests you believe in a proposition, you must first examine it to see whether it is acceptable, because our reason was created by God, and whatever pleases our reason can but please divine reason, of which, for that matter, we know only what we infer from the processes of our own reason by analogy and often by negation.

In the Middle Ages, cathendrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World War II movie in the Pacific without a fighter plane shot down in flames.

Because of lies, we can produce and invent a possible world.

It was awkward, revisiting a world you have never seen before: like coming home, after a long journey, to someone else’s house.

I developed a passion for the Middle Ages the same way some people develop a passion for coconuts.