“... we have given you a world as contradictory as a female, as cabbalistic as a male, a conscienceless hermaphrodite who plays heaven off against hell, hell off against heaven, revolving in the ballroom of the skies glittering with conflict as diamonds: we have wasted paradox and mystery on you when all you ask us for is cause and effect!A copy of your birth-certificate was all you needed to make you at peace with Creation. How uneconomical the whole thing's been.”

“We are all of us lost. The best we can do is make whatever we're lost in as much like home as we can.”

“Mephistopheles: Within the bowels of these elements,Where we are tortured and remain forever.Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribedIn one self place, for where we are is hell,And where hell is must we ever be.And, to conclude, when all the world dissolves,And every creature shall be purified,All places shall be hell that is not heaven.”

“I seem to wish to have some importanceIn the play of time. If not,Then sad was my mother's pain, my breath, my bones,My web of nerves, my wondering brain,to be shaped and quickened with such anticipationOnly to feed the swamp of space.What is deep, as love is deep, I'll haveDeeply. What is good, as love is good,I'll have well. Then if time and spaceHave any purpose, I shall belong to it.If not, if all is a pretty fictionTo distract the cherubim and seraphimWho so continually do cry, the leastI can do is to fill the curled shell of the worldWith human deep-sea sound, and hold it toThe ear of God, until he has appetiteTo taste our salt sorrow on his lips.And so you see it might be better to die.Though, on the other hand, I admit it mightBe immensely foolish.”

“Your life, sir, is propelledBy a dream of the fear of having nightmares; your loveIs the fear of being alone; your world's historyThe fear of a possible leap by a possible antagonistOut of a possible shadow, or a not-improbableSkeleton out of your dead-certain cupboard.”

“People sometimes accuse me of knowing a lot. "Stephen," they say, accusingly, "you know a lot." This is a bit like telling a person who has a few grains of sand clinging to him that he owns much sand. When you consider the vast amount of sand there is in the world such a person is, to all intents and purposes, sandless. We are all sandless. We are all ignorant. There are beaches and deserts and dunes of knowledge whose existance we have never even guessed at, let alone visited.”

“There are young men and women up and down the land who happily (or unhappily) tell anyone who will listen that they don’t have an academic turn of mind, or that they aren’t lucky enough to have been blessed with a good memory, and yet can recite hundreds of pop lyrics and reel off any amount of information about footballers. Why? Because they are interested in those things. They are curious. If you are hungry for food, you are prepared to hunt high and low for it. If you are hungry for information it is the same. Information is all around us, now more than ever before in human history. You barely have to stir or incommode yourself to find things out. The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriosity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.”