Francis Spufford Quotes

20 quotes in 450 categories

• We are supposed to be on the side of goodness in the sense that we need it, not that we are it.
• God doesn't want your careful virtue, He wants your reckless generosity.
• Taking the things people do wrong seriously is part of taking them seriously. It’s part of letting their actions have weight. It’s part of letting…
• Emotions can certainly be misleading: they can fool you into believing stuff that is definitely, demonstrably untrue.
• Belief demands that you dispense with illusion after illusion, while contemporary common sense requires continual, fluffy pretending - pretending that might as well be systematic,…
• 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…
• The emotions that sustain religious belief are all, in fact, deeply ordinary and deeply recognisable to anybody who has ever made their way across the…
• 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…
• I can always tell when you're reading somewhere in the house,' my mother used to say. 'There's a special silence, a reading silence.
• 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 I…
• Goblins burrowed in the earth, elves sang songs in the trees: Those were the obvious wonders of reading, but behind them lay the fundamental marvel…
• You never came out the way you came in.
• What follows is more about books than it is about me, but nonetheless it is my inward autobiography, for the words we take into ourselves…
• 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,…
• 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…
• I am a fairly orthodox Christian. Every Sunday, I say and do my best to mean the whole of the Creed, which is a series…
• Self-awareness is not the same thing as self-approval, any more than imagination is the same thing as day-dreaming.
• For a believer, Christian faith is true to the human heart, not in the sense that any old thing we fancy believing in will become…
• Anyone can be self-educated if they find the loose end of something to care about passionately.
• I want to know why I read as a child with such a frantic appetite, why I sucked the words off the page with such…

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