“Books give us pleasure not because they make us comfortable, though some good ones may, but because they entertain us, they make us laugh, they make us cry; they inform, persuade, disturb, convince, seduce us; they make us think, speculate, see - and we recognize what we see as true, not as the truth but as a truth in the writer's fabulous construction that corresponds to what we have observed in ourselves, or others, or in the world at large, or can conceive of observing.”

“We tell stories to talk out the trouble in our lives, trouble otherwise so often so unspeakable. It is one of our main ways of making our lives sensible. Trying to live without stories can make us crazy. They help us recognize what we believe to be most valuable in the world, and help us identify what we hold demonic.”

“But it is not the job of truth to make us feel good. It is the job of truth to be true, and it is our job to deal with it.”

“It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes... we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions - especially selfish ones.”

“You're no different than the rest of us, Victor. We all see ourselves as this dissatisfied thing, this ego, looking outside ourselves for just that one other thing that will make us complete. That job, that lover, that pot of money. Even enlightenment, as if that too is a thing we can grab hold of to complete what needs completing. There is always something, we believe, that will make us whole. But if you take a finite thing, like body and mind, and look for something outside it to make it complete, something like money or love or faith, what you are seeking is also just a finite thing. So you have a finite thing reaching for the infinite by grabbing for some other finite thing and you end up with nothing more than a deeper sense of dissatisfaction.”

“Our Father, who has set a restlessness in our hearts and made us all seekers after that which we can never fully find, forbid us to be satisfied with what we make of life. Draw us from base content and set our eyes on far-off goals. Keep us at tasks too hard for us that we may be driven to Thee for strength. Deliver us from fretfulness and self-pitying; make us sure of the good we cannot see and of the hidden good in the world. Open our eyes to simple beauty all around us and our hearts to the loveliness men hide from us because we do not try to understand them. Save us from ourselves and show us a vision of a world made new.”

“The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.”