“Every sin is an attempt to fly from emptiness. ”

“All sins are attempts to fill voids.”

“Sin is not a distance, it is a turning of our gaze in the wrong direction.”

“When I think of the Crucifixion, I commit the sin of envy.”

“All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void. The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.”

“Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.”

“There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies.”