Quotes from Francis Spufford

Without faith, there'd be nothing but indifferent material forces at work. It's only when the idea of events having an author is introduced that the universe becomes cruel, as opposed to merely heavy, or fast-moving, or prone to unpredictable acceleration.

He kept wanting to make things happen, when he should have found something that was happening anyway, and just gone along with it.

Rockets now evoke a slightly old-fashioned kind of wonder, because they stand for an obsolete version of technological prowess. In the scheme of history which has become the most popular version of the recent past, the Space Age counts as the final phase of the Age of Industry – its culmination, just before the paradigm changed and the Age of Information replaced steel with digits.

I think," he said, "that you may be the kind of dog who bites because she is chained up." He expected her to laugh, or to flash out at him, or to do both. She did not look up, but with a melancholy kind of trouble in her eyes. "A lovely analogy: I thank you," she said. "But what if I am the kind of dog who bites because it pleases her?" "I don't believe it," said Smith.

First, the white ceiling. Then the slow realisation that this was not the dark, damp timber six inches above his nose to which he had woken for six weeks in his bunk aboard Henrietta. Then the memory of his purpose; and the whole variorum mosaic of the evening before; and a burning curiosity. The light through the gable window was full sunshine. He

Me? Never in life!' said Smith, giving them his familiar beam of amiability: only now with a ragged carelessness, a desultory approximation, like a man who briefly raises a mask on a stick to his face but cannot be bothered to line up the eye holes. Septimus and Hendrick glanced at each other involuntarily, to share the dismay that each for different reasons was feeling.

You do not chuse where You bestow your Heart. Your Heart bestows Itself, will-you-nill-you, in the Midst of other Business. —

It has duration. Can it not, itself, be split in two? And split again, and again, and again, divided and subdivided ad infinitum, with no stopping point? Does it not, itself, contain an abyss? The fabric of ordinary time is all hollow beneath, opening into void below void, gulf behind gulf. Every moment you care to define proving on examination to be a close-packed sheaf of finer, and yet finer ones without end; finer, in fact, always and forever, than whatever your last guess was.

If you're a believer, God is not a thought-experiment requiring a special sub-creation to be tried out in. He's an actual, er, actuality already, embedded in a necessary and true story about guilt, hope, and liberty. I don't want C. S. Lewis doing his resourceful best to render Him as a fabulous special effect.

Christianity is a religion of continuity and discontinuity as well. It's about what stays the same and what changes in the twinkling of an eye. Both are necessary truths, but sometimes it's important to accentuate the discontinuity, the sudden leap, the way you go up a tree, Zacchaeus, and come down a saint.

If you based your knowledge of the human species exclusively on adverts, you'd think that the normal condition of humanity was to be a good-looking single person between 20 and 35, with excellent muscle-definition and/or an excellent figure, and a large disposable income.

It's always struck me as unfair that writing has so little sensation when it's going well.

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

Emotions can certainly be misleading: they can fool you into believing stuff that is definitely, demonstrably untrue. Yet emotions are also our indispensable tool for navigating, for feeling our way through, the much larger domain of stuff that isn't susceptible to proof or disproof, that isn't checkable against the physical universe.

There have been low moments before, but Christianity is an incredibly adaptable organism, using different parts of its repertoire to mutate into new ecological niches, yet preserving intact its story of grace, of love improbably triumphant.

In a hundred years, Christianity will have mutated into something utterly unpredictable which, nevertheless, we'd recognize immediately. And same-sex marriage will be one of the fine old God-given traditions that conservatives leap to defend.

It's true that when Christianity is socially powerful, faith can look from the outside as if it is mainly a matter of membership, of participation in the vast synchronised swim of institutions.

Christians are as subject to complacency as anybody else, and we can certainly settle into repetition and forget that something radical and extraordinary is being asked of us as well - that we hold to an extraordinary promise about how, from moment to moment, something enters the world and enters us, after which everything is different.