“The willingness to undertake such action cannot be based on certainties, but on those possibilities glimpsed in a reading of history different from the customary painful recounting of human cruelties. In such a reading we can find not only war but resistance to war, not only injustice but rebellion against injustice, not only selfishness but self-sacrifice, not only silence in the fact of tyranny but defiance, not only callousness but compassion.Human beings show a broad spectrum of qualities, but it is the worst of these that are usually emphasized, and the result, too often, is to dishearten us, diminish our spirit. And yet, historically, that spirit refuses to surrender.”

“All of the world’s religions have important things to teach us, and they are not as different from each other as some would have you believe.”

“People think they need to be healed, but the truth is much more beautiful. Even a minute is more than we deserve. No one should be anything but dead. Instead we get honey of out rocks. Miracles from nothing. It’s easy. We don’t need to get better. We’re already us. And everything that is, is ours.”

“What struck me, in reading the reports from Sri Lanka, was the mild disgrace of belonging to our imperfectly evolved species in the first place. People who had just seen their neighbors swept away would tell the reporters that they knew a judgment had been coming, because the Christians had used alcohol and meat at Christmas or because … well, yet again you can fill in the blanks for yourself. It was interesting, though, to notice that the Buddhists were often the worst. Contentedly patting an image of the chubby lord on her fencepost, a woman told the New York Times that those who were not similarly protected had been erased, while her house was still standing. There were enough such comments, almost identically phrased, to make it seem certain that the Buddhist authorities had been promulgating this consoling and insane and nasty view. That would not surprise me.”

“It’s amazing how people can sound like retards when they’re talking to their girlfriend, especially if they really love her a lot. Because when you’re just fucking someone you make a point of keeping your cool, but when you’re really in love – it can sound pretty repulsive.”

“Perhaps it is our obligation to be noble before it is our obligation to be happy.”

“Ugandan understanding of God is somewhat misguided. It is sad how we build the pastor’s house while we struggle to even meet our own rent.”

“Writers shouldn’t fear criticism. Instead, they should fear silence. Criticism is healthy. It gets people thinking about your work and, even better, it gets them talking and arguing. But as for silence — it is the greatest killer of writers. So if you hate a book and want to hurt it — don’t talk about it. And if you hate my books — please, for God’s sake, shout it from the hills! ”

“If you believe what you like in the Gospel, and reject what you don’t like, it is not the Gospel you believe, but yourself.”

“Let love be your North Star.”

“Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

“The finger of the atheists’ own divinity, Reason, wrote on the wall the appalling judgments that there is no God; that the universe is only matter in spontaneous motion; and, most grievous word of all, that what men call their souls die with the death of the body, as music dies when the strings are broken.”

“But we never get back our youth… The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to.”

“I have almost completed a long novel, but it is unpublishable until my death and England’s.”

“Reading about the response of people in stories, plays, poems, helps us to respond more courageously and openly at our own moments of turning.”