54 Quotes by Francis Spufford

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 common ground of human experience as an adult.

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.

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.

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 an edge of desperation.

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

I was never argued out of faith; it was much more passive than that - and I wasn't argued back in, either.

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