“Even to see her walk across the room is a liberal education.”

“You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape? The words “compelle intrare,” compel them to come in, have been so abused be wicked men that we shudder at them; but, properly understood, they plumb the depth of the Divine mercy. The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.”

“Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.”

“It was likely, then that this—-this stumbling walk on a wet night across a ploughed field-—meant death. Death—-the thing one had always heard of (like love), the thing the poets had written about. So this was how it was going to be. But that was not the main point.”

“One of the reasons why it needs no special education to be a Christian is that Christianity is an education itself.”

“I thought ... that I was carried in the will of Him I love, but now I see that I walk with it. I thought that the good things He sent drew me into them as the waves lift the islands; but now I see that it is I who plunge into them with my own legs and arms, as when we go swimming. I feel as if I were living in that roofless world of [Earth] where men walk undefended beneath naked heaven. It is a delight with terror in it! One's own self to be walking from one good to another, walking beside Him as Himself may walk, not even holding hands. How has He made me so separate from Himself? How did it enter His mind to conceive such a thing? The world is so much larger than I thought. I thought we went along paths--but it seems there are no paths. The going itself is the path.”

“The Happy Trinity is her home: nothing can trouble her joy.She is the bird that evades every net: the wild deer that leaps every pitfall.Like the mother bird to its chickens or a shield to the armed knight: so is the Lord to her mind, in His unchanging lucidity.Bogies will not scare her in the dark: bullets will not frighten her in the day.Falsehoods tricked out as truths assail her in vain: she sees through the lie as if it were glass.The invisible germ will not harm her: nor yet the glittering sunstroke.A thousand fail to solve the problem, ten thousand choose the wrong turning: but she passes safely through.He details immortal gods to attend her: upon every road where she must travel.They take her hand at hard places: she will not stub her toes in the dark.She may walk among lions and rattlesnakes: among dinosaurs and nurseries of lionettes.He fills her brim full with immensity of life: he leads her to see the world’s desire.”