“ Self-awareness is not the same thing as self-approval, any more than imagination is the same thing as day-dreaming. Francis Spufford
“ What I absolutely want is to suggest that before it's anything else, redemption is God mending the bicycle of our souls; God bringing out the puncture repair kit, re-inflating the tires, taking off th… Francis Spufford
“ 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, ho… Francis Spufford
“ You ask for help and you get nothing: on a conscious level you may have decided that there was nobody there to help, but less consciously, since you did ask, it feels as if help was denied. Hence the… Francis Spufford
“ Seen from that future time, when every commodity the human mind could imagine would flow from the industrial horn of plenty in dizzy abundance, this would seem a scanty, shoddy, cramped moment indeed,… Francis Spufford
“ 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 that, in stories, words could command things to be. 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 the kind of thing you can know. It isn't a knowable item.) But then, like eve… Francis Spufford
“ The part of thinking that’s easy to handle is the part that works by analogy with speech. Thinking in words, speaking our thoughts internally, projects an auditorium inside our skulls. Dark or bright,… Francis Spufford
“ He cannot do anything deliberate now. The strain of his whole weight on his outstretched arms hurts too much. The pain fills him up, displaces thought, as much for him as it has for everyone else who… Francis Spufford
