“Here we are, I thought, a bunch of grown-up kids locked in an empty room playing naive games with each other. No one understands anybody else. We are wandering around in dark caves, holding our little private candles, hoping for some great illumination. I don't like to think I'm as confused or simple-minded as the others, but if I really am more complex, more experienced than they are, why should I want them to understand me?”

“I'm a writer and this is what I do no matter what name we put to it. Year by year, the world is turning into a darker and stranger place than any of us could want. This is the only thing I do that has potential to shine a little further than my immediate surroundings. For me, each story is a little candle held up to the dark of night, trying to illuminate the hope for a better world where we all respect and care for each other.”

“I was naive and thought we could express our feelings to each other- not suppress them and keep holding them back. Well, it was what I felt, and why should I be untrue to myself? I came to believe the importance that if you feel something strong enough then you should say it.”

“There are some great mysteries here and I believe that each one of us is better placed to understand them than any sceptical scientist or religious zealot, simply because our Universe is not the same as theirs. We are, each of us, on our own journey; and whilst that journey continually interacts with those of others, it always remains uniquely ours. To understand that journey, because it is ‘magical’, we must look at it with the eyes of a child. I hope the essential simplicity of ‘The 7 Gifts’ will encourage readers to do that.”

“Many of our attempts to understand Christian faith have only cheapened it. I can no more understand the totality of God than the pancake I made for breakfast understands the complexity of me. The little we do understand, that grain of sand our minds are capable of grasping, those ideas such as God is good, God feels, God loves, God knows all, are enough to keep our hearts dwelling on His majesty and otherness forever.”

“Norman Bates: ... No one really runs away from anything. It's like a private trap that holds us in like a prison. You know what I think? I think that we're all in our private traps, clamped in them, and none of us can ever get out. We scratch and we claw, but only at the air, only at each other, and for all of it, we never budge an inch.Marion Crane: Sometimes... we deliberately step into those traps.Norman Bates: I was born into mine. I don't mind it anymore.Marion Crane: Oh, but you should. You should mind it.Norman Bates: Oh, I do...[laughs]Norman Bates: But I say I don't.”