The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbour's talents--or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall.

The literary man re-reads, other men simply read.

To be stories at all they must be a series of events: but it must be understood that this series - the plot, as we call it - is only really a new whereby to catch something else.

I suspect there is something in our very mode of thought which makes it inevitable that we should always be baffled by actual existence, whatever character actual existence may have.

I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, hoever, turns out to be not a state but a process.

Now the proper good of a creature is to surrender itself to its Creator - to enact intellectually, volitionally and emotionally, that relationship which is given in the mere fact of its being a creature when it does so, it is good and happy.