Enlightenment

...in the ordinary way we love because we're loved, and give more or less what we're given. But to love without return is more strange and more wonderful, and not the humiliating thing I'd once taken it to be. To give love without receiving it is to understand that we are made in the image of God--because the love of God is immense and indiscriminate and can never be returned to the same degree, Go on loving when your love is unreturned, I said, and you are just a little lower than the angels. (Thomas Hart)

So I told her this: that it's true I've only rarely been happy, and perhaps more often been sad. But I have been content. I have lived. I have felt everything available to me: I've been faithless, devout, indifferent, ardent, diligent, and careless; full of hope and disappointment, bewildered by time and fate or confused by providence--and all of it ticking through me while the pendulum of my life loses amplitude by the hour. (Thomas Hart)

- wanting God is God himself. He exists in the stars not because he made them on the fourth day, but because we have the inclination to look up, and wonder.

Did women really assemble themselves out of the parts they thought most likely to be wanted? Was that love's requirement? If so, she'd have none of it.

I don't understand it all,' said Thomas [to Nathan]. 'I've wondered all my life what I owe to love. There was a time I felt that because I loved a man, he was in my debt--that he'd made me love him, and so he owed me his love in return. And now he is dead, and I can never receive even a part of what I gave! But the world turned and I came to believe that all we owe to love is humility and gratitude that we were ever loved at all. You think it's humble to say it cannot be real--that she's [Grace's] mistaken, since you're not free. But that's a kind of pride. Real humility is submitting with wonder and gratitude to being loved--real wisdom is submitting with wonder and gratitude to being loved--real wisdom is understanding how amazing it is, how improbable and really absurd, that she was summoned out of nothing, as we all were, and happens to breathe this air when you breathe it, and see this world when you see it, and that out of all the billions of fellow travelers it is your word she waits for as she sits alone in her room! Well: that's a responsibility and probably a terrible one, and I can't help you with it. You must work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, and let me work out mine.

I wish I could say, James, that we forgave each other in the end. I wish I could say: she put her head on my shoulder and I welcomed it and we laughed and said all was well. But in fact we were quiet for a long time, and we heard a television laughing across the road and the train leaving for Liverpool Street, and then she said, 'Do you think we can love each other and never ever forgive?' I didn't know, I said. But I thought we ought to try. (Thomas Hart)

All we owe to love is humility and gratitude that we were ever loved at all.

That's how it has always been for me, she thought, falling toward nothing - she pressed at a sore place on a prickled finger where infection had set in - soon enough I won't be a woman who doesn't have children, but a woman who didn't have children - soon nobody will see me, and there'll be no more surprises.

Doesn't an attempt at faith constitute faith itself? It's a dreadful thing to confuse faith with certainty.

He had the ease of a creature never told it was a sinner from the womb.

Thomas [Hart] lived where he'd been born, and where (so he often thought without rancor) he'd very likely die; and if he lived alone he was not lonely, that being a condition not of solitude but of longing, and Thomas was not a discontented man.

it is indifferent to every kind of doctrine and legislation, and its universal light is neither sacred nor profane.

and meanwhile their parents, nursing lifelong headaches, total up the costs of the day.

I’ve heard it said that at the first sip from the glass of the natural sciences you will become an atheist—then at the bottom of the glass, God will be waiting for you.

in the ordinary way we love because we’re loved, and give more or less what we’re given. But to love without return is more strange and more wonderful, and not the humiliating thing I’d once taken it to be. To give love without receiving it is to understand we are made in the image of God—because the love of God is immense and indiscriminate and can never be returned to the same degree. Go on loving when your love is unreturned, I said, and you are just a little lower than the angels.

always come down to this: that wanting God is God himself. He exists in the stars not because he made them on the fourth day, but because we have the inclination to look up, and wonder.

In this model there is no sequence of events unfurling on a timeline: it all occurs simultaneously, and our experience of it depends on how the block is sliced. I

how I can go on believing it, I always come down to this: that wanting God is God himself. He exists in the stars not because he made them on the fourth day,

Then what do you believe now?” She laughed, and saw his responding gleam, and was grateful. “If I wake up convinced there’s no God,” she said, “I’ll find him by lunchtime. But if I go to bed and pray for the salvation of my soul, I’ll know I’ve got no soul to save by breakfast.

that wanting God is God himself. He exists in the stars not because he made them on the fourth day, but because we have the inclination to look up, and wonder.

But I won't have you think my heart was broken because it was a man I loved. My heart was broken because I am alive.

It was good of you to come," he said. He did not say: please come back to me soon.

Do you think you lose your faith, because your faith does not want you?

I'm already coming to know you, whether you like it or not. A little mad, I think; handsome and rich; bad-tempered and clever and miserably in love. And I'm mad too, I suppose, talking to a dead woman—what's got into me?

Thomas moved across his kitchen, and fancifully it occurred to him that the motion of his body displaced the universe - that it slipped aside to accommodate him; that it might be said that he was no less significant, and certainly no more, than a comet dispensing its days of ordinary grace. The gold heart was beating on the table. You are here, Thomas Hart. Here you are.

She burrowed against him with an impulse of affection and pleasure. It seemed to Thomas that even to watch them was a trespass, and nobody, he thought, a bit of old string in his hand, nobody on earth was ever as solitary as me.

All I've done lately that was worth doing was find a lost cat on Lower Bridge Road and take her to her owner - but she was lost again the following week, and so it all begins again.

The pain in his hip set in with the insistent spit it generally reserved for winter, and this was the effect of boredom: there was nothing else to occupy his mind.