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. Francis Spufford More Quotes by Francis Spufford More Quotes From Francis Spufford 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. Francis Spufford old something will marriage What we need in Europe is to push back against the idea that religion is so farfetched that it's not worth talking about. Francis Spufford push back talking religion 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. Francis Spufford you tree sometimes religion 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. Francis Spufford i-am best you mistake It's true that when Christianity is socially powerful, faith can look from the outside as if it is mainly a matter of membership, of participation in the vast synchronised swim of institutions. Francis Spufford true look faith matter 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 conveniently true - but because the complicated truth about our hearts, as we struggle to perceive it, tells us what we are and where we are, and consequently what we need. Francis Spufford truth struggle faith heart 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. Francis Spufford leave wealth walking past Anyone can be self-educated if they find the loose end of something to care about passionately. Francis Spufford find end something care 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. Francis Spufford you education believe culture 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. Francis Spufford words child know want It's always struck me as unfair that writing has so little sensation when it's going well. Francis Spufford me always unfair writing 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. Francis Spufford why know selfishness pleasure 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. Francis Spufford best you hope god
