“Why was this bloody world created?""As a sewer for the stars," a voice in front of him said. "Alternatively to know God and to glorify Him forever."" [...] The two answers are not, of course, necessarily alternative.”

“There is no possible idea," Kenneth thought as he came onto the terrace, "to which the mind of man can't supply some damned alternative or other. Yet one must act.”

“Our crucifixes exhibit the pain, but they veil, perhaps necessarily, the obscenity: but the death of the God-Man was both.”

“but it was a religion which enabled him to despise himself and everyone else without despising the universe, thus allowing him at once in argument or conversation to the advantages of the pessimist and the optimist.”

“She sat the sister of Arthur, the wife of Lotfour sons got by him, and one not.”

“The famous saying 'God is love', it is generally assumed, means that God is like our immediate emotional indulgence, not that the meaning of love ought to have something of the 'otherness' and terror of God.”

“An hour's conversation on literature between two ardent minds with a common devotion to a neglected poet is a miraculous road to intimacy.”