“The novel's spirit is the spirit of complexity. . . . The novel's spirit is the spirity of continuity . . . a thing made to last, to connect the past with the future.”

“Past boldness is no assurance of future boldness. Boldness demands continual reliance on God's spirit.”

“Poetry, plays, novels, music, they are the cry of the human spirit trying to understand itself and make sense of our world.”

“I will live in the past, the present, and the future. The spirits of all three shall strive within me.”

“Whatever men make," she says, "what they felt when they made it is there...Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.”

“What an incredible amount of poetry, of novels, of sociological solutions to the ills of the world! One supposes that poetry is written to enrich the spirit; that novels have been conceived at the very least, to entertain us; and even, optimistically, that sociological solutions are a guide to solving something. Viewing the situation calmly, I realized that the first (poetry) was capable of impoverishing the richest spirit, the second of boring the most joyful, the third of confusing the most lucid.”