“The greatest hindrance to growth in faith is comfortable living.”

“Dickens' hypocrites are the prime beneficiaries of his inventive genius. The heroes and heroines have no imagination. We could scrap all the solemn parts of his novels without impairing his status as a writer. But we could not remove Mrs. Gamp or Pecksniff or Bounderby without maiming him irreparably.”

“Dickens' plots are his most discardable properties, and often have to be pushed aside to let the strange poetry of his imagination emerge.”

“One of history’s most useful tasks is to bring home to us how keenly, honestly and painfully, past generations pursued aims that now seem to us wrong or disgraceful.”

“...literature gives you ideas to think with. It stocks your mind. It does not indoctrinate, because diversity, counter-argument, reappraisal and qualification are its essence. But it supplies the materials for thought. Also, because it is the only art capable of criticism, it encourages questioning, and self-questioning.”

“Serving as the only audience for a man raised by crowds of admirers exhausted her. [...] The buried thought that he might have found comfort elsewhere was almost a comfort to her.”

“There was something about thatword—we—that comforted me. There was no longer him. There was nolonger me. There was us.”