“No, I thought, growing more rebellious, life has its own laws and it is for me to defend myself against whatever comes along, without going snivelling to God about sin, my own or other people's. How would it profit a man if he got into a tight place, to call he people who put him there miserable sinners? Or himself a miserable sinner? I disliked the levelling aspect of this sinnerdom, it was like a cricket match played in a drizzle, where everybody had an excuse - and what a dull excuse! - for playing badly. Life was meant to test a man, bring out his courage, initiative, resource; and I longed, I thought, to be tested: I didn't want to fall on my knees and call myself a miserable sinner. But the idea of goodness did attract me, for I did not regard it as the opposite of sin. I saw it as something bright and positive and sustaining, like the sunshine, something to be adored, but from afar.”

“I remember Christian teachers telling me long ago that I must hate a bad man's actions but not hate the bad man: or, as they would say, hate the sin but not the sinner. ...I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life -- namely myself. However much I might dislike my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself. There had never been the slightest difficulty about it. In fact the very reason why I hated the things was that I loved the man. Just because I loved myself, I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did those things.”

“Ignorance of the law of irreducibility was no excuse. I could no longer excuse myself with the claim that I didn't know the law -- for knowledge of self and of the world is the law that, even though unattainable, cannot be broken, and no one can excuse himself by saying that he doesn't know it. . . . The renewed originality of the sin is this: I have to carry out my unknowing, I shall be sinning originally against life.”

“If I were in heaven, Nelly, I should be extremely miserable." "Because you are not fit to go there," I answered. "All sinners would be miserable in heaven.”

“I do not understand what I do....It is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me...For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do - this I keep on doing...I find this law at work: when I want to do good, evil is right there with me...I delight in God's law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin...I myself in my mind am a slave to God's law, but in the sinful nature a slave to the law of sin.”

“I did not make myself the heroine of my tales. Life appeared to me too common-place an affair as regarded myself. I could not figure to myself that romantic woes or wonderful events would ever by my lot; but I was not confided to my own identify, and I could people the hours with creations far more interesting to me at that age than my own sensations.”