You don't have to become an investment banker as a way of demonstrating that education has worked for you. But librarians have to believe in the values of high culture. Not just high culture but middle culture, low culture, kinds… — Francis Spufford Copy Share Image
Belief demands that you dispense with illusion after illusion, while contemporary common sense requires continual, fluffy pretending - pretending that might as well be systematic, it's so thoroughly incentivised by our culture. — Francis Spufford Copy Share Image
If your memory was OK you could descend upon on a bookshop – a big enough one so that the staff wouldn’t hassle a browser – and steal the contents of books by reading them. I drank down 1984 while loitering in the 'O' section of the giant Heffers store in Cambridge. When I was full I carried the slopping… — Francis Spufford Copy Share
There have been low moments before, but Christianity is an incredibly adaptable organism, using different parts of its repertoire to mutate into new ecological… — Francis Spufford Copy Share Image
“Beyond the breakwater you can no longer touch bottom, but you are not afraid, for in this sea the harder you swim the stronger you grow, and the farther out you go the better it gets. More and more completely you feel the liquid embrace of the water, and yet appetite is not quenched here by being satisfied; from happiness… — Francis Spufford Copy Share
Self-awareness is not the same thing as self-approval, any more than imagination is the same thing as day-dreaming. — Francis Spufford Copy Share Image
What follows is more about books than it is about me, but nonetheless it is my inward autobiography, for the words we take into… — Francis Spufford Copy Share Image
Despite the best efforts of apologists like William Lane Craig, the 'evidence' for Christianity's truth is, in truth, not the kind that science will… — Francis Spufford Copy Share Image
“You do not chuse where You bestow your Heart. Your Heart bestows Itself, will-you-nill-you, in the Midst of other Business. —” — Francis Spufford Copy Share Image
Anyone can be self-educated if they find the loose end of something to care about passionately. — Francis Spufford Copy Share Image
For a believer, Christian faith is true to the human heart, not in the sense that any old thing we fancy believing in will… — Francis Spufford Copy Share Image
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… — Francis Spufford Copy Share Image
“...what goes on inside believers is mysterious. So far as it can be guessed at - if for some reason you wanted to guess… — Francis Spufford Copy Share Image
