Francis Spufford Quotes

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.

Libraries are public treasuries. They’re ways in which well-meaning societies leave the wealth of the past arranged A to Z so that anyone walking past can find it.

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

You don’t have to become an investment banker as a way of demonstrating that education has worked for you. But librarians have to believe in the values of high culture. Not just high culture but middle culture, low culture, kinds of exciting eye-catching crap of all kinds. Everyone needs that.

Why do I write? From selfishness. Because this state of liquefied, complex concentration, however faintly and dimly I’m able to perceive it, is the greatest pleasure I know.

What we need in Europe is to push back against the idea that religion is so farfetched that it’s not worth talking about.

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

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

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.

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, yet preserving intact its story of grace, of love improbably triumphant.

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.

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

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 of propositions. But it is still a mistake to suppose that it is assent to the propositions that makes you a believer. It is the feelings that are primary.

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

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.

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

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 help to shape us.

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.

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 brush my teeth.

In a hundred years, Christianity will have mutated into something utterly unpredictable which, nevertheless, we’d recognize immediately. And same-sex marriage will be one of the fine old God-given traditions that conservatives leap to defend.

Despite the best efforts of apologists like William Lane Craig, the ‘evidence’ for Christianity’s truth is, in truth, not the kind that science will or should ever admit. We believers mean something different by the word: something that puts faith permanently in the category of irreproducible results.