Francis Spufford

If your memory was OK you could descend upon on a bookshop – a big enough one so that the staff wouldn’t…

— Francis Spufford

There have been low moments before, but Christianity is an incredibly adaptable organism, using different parts of its repertoire to mutate into…

— Francis Spufford

“Beyond the breakwater you can no longer touch bottom, but you are not afraid, for in this sea the harder you swim…

— Francis Spufford

Self-awareness is not the same thing as self-approval, any more than imagination is the same thing as day-dreaming.

— Francis Spufford

What follows is more about books than it is about me, but nonetheless it is my inward autobiography, for the words we…

— Francis Spufford

Despite the best efforts of apologists like William Lane Craig, the 'evidence' for Christianity's truth is, in truth, not the kind that…

— Francis Spufford

“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

Anyone can be self-educated if they find the loose end of something to care about passionately.

— Francis Spufford

You never came out the way you came in.

— Francis Spufford

For a believer, Christian faith is true to the human heart, not in the sense that any old thing we fancy believing…

— Francis Spufford

When I'm tired and therefore indecisive, it can take half an hour to choose the book I am going to have with…

— Francis Spufford

“...what goes on inside believers is mysterious. So far as it can be guessed at - if for some reason you wanted…

— Francis Spufford

I can always tell when you're reading somewhere in the house,' my mother used to say. 'There's a special silence, a reading…

— Francis Spufford

I think I have made allowances for the kind of despair which would test my faith, but you cannot know in advance…

— Francis Spufford

You don't have to become an investment banker as a way of demonstrating that education has worked for you. But librarians have…

— Francis Spufford

It's true that when Christianity is socially powerful, faith can look from the outside as if it is mainly a matter of…

— Francis Spufford

I want to know why I read as a child with such a frantic appetite, why I sucked the words off the…

— Francis Spufford

“I don't know if there's a God. (And neither do you, and neither does Professor Dawkins, and neither does anybody. It isn't…

— Francis Spufford

The emotions that sustain religious belief are all, in fact, deeply ordinary and deeply recognisable to anybody who has ever made their…

— Francis Spufford

We are supposed to be on the side of goodness in the sense that we need it, not that we are it.

— Francis Spufford

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

— Francis Spufford

God doesn't want your careful virtue, He wants your reckless generosity.

— Francis Spufford

Goblins burrowed in the earth, elves sang songs in the trees: Those were the obvious wonders of reading, but behind them lay…

— Francis Spufford

Christians are as subject to complacency as anybody else, and we can certainly settle into repetition and forget that something radical and…

— Francis Spufford

“What is the tactful, the effective way of announcing that your life’s work has been wasted?”

— Francis Spufford