“A man has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping it; and one's religion is never complete and final, it seems, but must always be undergoing modification.”

“A truly religious man does not embrace a religion; and he who embraces one has no religion.”

“Man…who lives in three places – in the past, in the present, and in the future – can be unhappy if one of these three is worthless. Religion has even added a fourth – eternity.”

“The woman who preaches has poison religion. Let the respectable ones go”

“One strength of the communist system of the East is that it has some of the character of a religion and inspires the emotions of a religion. ”

“If religion is true, one must believe. And if one chooses not to believe, one’s choice is marked under the category of a refusal, and is thus never really free: it has the duress of a recoil.” With literary belief, however, “one is always free to choose not to believe.” This, Wood argues, is the freedom of literature; it is what constitutes its “reality.”