The emptiness was intense, like the stillness in a great factory when the machinery stops running.

After all, the supreme virtue in all art is soul, perhaps it is the only thing which gives art a right to be.

Art and religion (they are the same thing, in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had.

Life was so short that it meant nothing at all unless it were continually reinforced by something that endured; unless the shadows of individual existence came and went against a background that held together.

When the eyes of the flesh are shut, the eyes of the spirit are open.

The trouble is you almost have to marry a man before you can find out the sort of wife he needs; and usually it's exactly the sort you are not.

In other searchings it might be the object of the quest that brought satisfaction, or it might be something incidental that one got on the way; but in religion, desire was fulfilment, it was the seeking itself that rewarded.