The only form of fiction in which real characters do not seem out of place is history. In novels they are detestable.

Out of the unreal shadows of night comes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where we had left off... p 207

The world seemed to me fine because you were in it, and goodness more real because you lived.

Medievalism, with its saints and martyrs, its love of self-torture, its wild passion for wounding itself, its gashing with knives, and its whipping with rods - Medievalism is real Christianity, and the medieval Christ is the real Christ.

But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins.