I can always tell when you're reading somewhere in the house,' my mother used to say. 'There's a special silence, a reading silence.

Goblins burrowed in the earth, elves sang songs in the trees: Those were the obvious wonders of reading, but behind them lay the fundamental marvel that, in stories, words could command things to be.

You never came out the way you came in.

God doesn't want your careful virtue, He wants your reckless generosity.

The emotions that sustain religious belief are all, in fact, deeply ordinary and deeply recognisable to anybody who has ever made their way across the common ground of human experience as an adult.

Emotions can certainly be misleading: they can fool you into believing stuff that is definitely, demonstrably untrue.

We are supposed to be on the side of goodness in the sense that we need it, not that we are it.

What follows is more about books than it is about me, but nonetheless it is my inward autobiography, for the words we take into ourselves help to shape us.

When I'm tired and therefore indecisive, it can take half an hour to choose the book I am going to have with me while I brush my teeth.

Self-awareness is not the same thing as self-approval, any more than imagination is the same thing as day-dreaming.

You can't study the darkness by flooding it with light.

No one can be your sun, moon, or stars until you have your own world.

The thing they're trying to stop is 30-million people getting health insurance. That's the substance.

Most of us would be willing to pay as we go if we could just finish paying for where we've been.

A cold heart is my protection mechanism. I don't really feel anything for anyone.

My inheritance how lordly wide and fair; Time is my fair seed-field, to Time I'm heir.

There is nothing that is truly free nor democratic enough. Make no mistake, the internet did not come to save the world.

Each man is his own absolute lawgiver, the dispenser of glory or gloom to himself; the decreer of his life, his reward, his punishment.

Those who refused to respond to the new stimulus would perish. Adapt or perish.

Tell me where is fancy bred, Or in the heart, or in the head?