Quotes from Susan Howatch

Sin is when you turn away from God—or, in the other language, alienation occurs when the ego, that erratic, unreliable driver of the personality, temporarily turns aside from the great quest for integration with the inner self, the self that's authentic, the self that contains the potential to be fully human, fully fulfilled and fully alive.

I saw that locked up in his nineteenth-century metaphysical illusions he was unapproachable.

You know how important you are to me—' 'As important as a bottle of medicine which gets thrown away as soon as the patient recovers

No demon can withstand the power of Christ," said my father, repeating the words he had used long ago, and what he meant was that no dissociated mind can withstand the integrating power of the Living God whose spark lies deep in the core of the unconscious mind and who can not only heal the shattered ego but unify the entire personality.

Sin/ alienation is psychological disease which if unhealed can lead to the living hell of lost hopes and blighted lives.

At last it occurred to me that I could not continue to sit at my desk, drink whisky and shudder at the thought of the Fordites.

The sad part was that everything I said was true but I was going about the healing in entirely the wrong way. As I was to be taught later, you can't heal the sick by force-feeding them with ideas they're not ready to accept; you can't cure people by the simple imposition of your will. It's the power of the Holy Spirit that heals, not the power of a would-be wonder-worker trying to play God.

So many people fail to realise that the greatest journey one can ever take is the journey to the very centre of one's being.

It's hard to see people properly,' I said, 'when there's a big shadow blocking the light.

I had to make myself presentable. Doggedly I dosed myself with Alka-Seltzer.

Friendship, however begun, is a voyage of discovery, full of perils and surprizes. (quoting Letters of Herbert Hensley Henson).

Nothing's for ever. Everything changes eventually, and it's the people who adapt who survive.

It might be impossible to make sense of life: life was not worth living until the attempt to do so had been made." CHARLES E. RAVEN

I vomited neatly into the corner basin. That made me feel better, and as I sluiced away the mess I made a new resolution to behave in an orderly Christian fashion.

It was the past, the uncomplicated past seen far away at the end of the golden corridor of nostalgia

It was the beauty of a thousand yesterdays and perhaps of a thousand tomorrows, timeless Cashelmara, geometrically perfect, splendidly stark

I'm too much of a coward to be an atheist," I said. "I couldn't bear not to believe in anything. I have to believe there's God

the most important thing of all was that I should be myself. "If you try to be someone other than yourself you'll never be happy," he had said. "You've got to be honest with yourself so that you can be honest with other people.

Then I saw that all I really wanted was a room of my own lined with books, congenial work in pleasant surroundings, and a reasonable amount of civilized conversation with intelligent people.

don't play bridge but I'm going to learn. The

Everyone was interchangeable. Black and white no longer existed

The only side I had to take was my own

Parenthood only ends with the grave.

It's not enough to do one's best. One should do what one knows to be right