Quotes by Francis Spufford - Page 1

You never came out the way you came in.
Francis Spufford / Author
Funny
Inspirational
Funny Inspirational
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God doesn't want your careful virtue, He wants your reckless generosity.
Francis Spufford / Author
Generosity
Virtue
Want
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It's always struck me as unfair that writing has so little sensation when it's going well.
Francis Spufford / Author
Unfair
Sensation
Struck
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We are supposed to be on the side of goodness in the sense that we need it, not that we are it.
Francis Spufford / Author
Goodness
Needs
Sides
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Anyone can be self-educated if they find the loose end of something to care about passionately.
Francis Spufford / Author
Loose
Passionately
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I was never argued out of faith; it was much more passive than that - and I wasn't argued back in, either.
Francis Spufford / Author
Faith
Passive
Argued
Either
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Self-awareness is not the same thing as self-approval, any more than imagination is the same thing as day-dreaming.
Francis Spufford / Author
Imagination
Self Awareness
Same Thing
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Emotions can certainly be misleading: they can fool you into believing stuff that is definitely, demonstrably untrue.
Francis Spufford / Author
Believe
Fool
Stuff
Untrue
Believing
Certainly
Emotions
Misleading
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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 / Author
Push
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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 / Author
Mother
Reading
Silence
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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.
Francis Spufford / Author
Book
Teeth
Tired
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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 / Author
Appetite
Desperation
Frantic
Edge
Page
Sucked
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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.
Francis Spufford / Author
Book
Inward
Shapes
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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 / Author
Wealth
Arranged
Libraries
Societies
Well-Meaning
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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 / Author
Concentration
Perceive
Selfishness
Complex
Greatest Pleasure
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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 / Author
Christianity
Membership
Participation
Swim
Vast
Mainly
Socially
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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.
Francis Spufford / Author
Adults
Belief
Common Ground
Human Experience
Ordinary
Religious
Religious Belief
Deeply
Recognisable
Sustain
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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 / Author
Reading
Song
Tree
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Belief demands that you dispense with illusion after illusion, while contemporary common sense requires continual, fluffy pretending - pretending that might as well be systematic, it's so thoroughly incentivised by our culture.
Francis Spufford / Author
Belief
Common Sense
Contemporary
Culture
Demand
Fluffy
Systematic
Dispense
Requires
Thoroughly
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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.
Francis Spufford / Author
Adaptable
Christianity
Ecological
Grace
Moments
Triumphant
Love New Story
Different Parts
Incredibly
Intact
Low
Niches
Organism
Parts
Preserving
Repertoire
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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 / Author
Marriage
Christianity
Fine
Leap
Nevertheless
Unpredictable
Conservatives
Defend
God-Given
Hundred Years
Immediately
Recognize
Same-Sex
Same-Sex Marriage
Traditions
Utterly
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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.
Francis Spufford / Author
Disposable
Human Species
Humanity
Income
Single Person
Species
Thinking
Condition
Good-Looking
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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 / Author
Believer
Mistake
Orthodox
Sunday
Fairly
Assent
Creed
Every Sunday
Suppose
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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 / Author
Demonstrating
Investment
Banker
Low
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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.
Francis Spufford / Author
Christianity
Despite
Evidence
Truth Is
Admit
Category
Believers
Craig
Efforts
William
Lane
Permanently
Puts
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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 / Author
Believer
Christian Faith
Complicated
Fancy
Human Heart
Perceive
Consequently
Hearts
Old Thing
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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 / Author
Accentuate
Christianity
Continuity
Leap
Saint
Tree
Twinkling
Stays
Sudden
Truths
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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 / Author
Believer
Embedded
Fabulous
Guilt
Liberty
Resourceful
True Story
God Best Hope
Actual
Lewis
Render
Requiring
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I think I have made allowances for the kind of despair which would test my faith, but you cannot know in advance what disaster to those you love would be too much to bear faithfully, and like everyone's, my faith is weakly conditional in some ways. I hope, I pray not to lose it. My fingers are crossed. Also my heart.
Francis Spufford / Author
Conditional
Despair
Disaster
Fingers
Love Faith Hope
Pray
Advance
Allowances
Bear
Crossed
Faithfully
Test
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Emotions can certainly be misleading: they can fool you into believing stuff that is definitely, demonstrably untrue. Yet emotions are also our indispensable tool for navigating, for feeling our way through, the much larger domain of stuff that isn't susceptible to proof or disproof, that isn't checkable against the physical universe.
Francis Spufford / Author
Domain
Fool
Indispensable
Proof
Susceptible
Untrue
Believing
Misleading
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Christians are as subject to complacency as anybody else, and we can certainly settle into repetition and forget that something radical and extraordinary is being asked of us as well - that we hold to an extraordinary promise about how, from moment to moment, something enters the world and enters us, after which everything is different.
Francis Spufford / Author
Complacency
Extraordinary
Promise
Radical
Repetition
Anybody Else
Asked
Certainly
Christians
Hold
Settle
Subject
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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 the rust, making us roadworthy once more. Not so that we can take flight into ecstasy, but so that we can do the next needful mile of our lives.
Francis Spufford / Author
God
Bicycle
Ecstasy
Flight
Mending
Next
Our Lives
Puncture
Redemption
Rust
Once
Absolutely
Anything
Anything Else
Before
Bringing
Take
Else
Off
Making
Mile
Once More
Repair
Souls
Suggest
Tires
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If your memory was OK you could descend upon on a bookshop – a big enough one so that the staff wouldn’t hassle a browser – and steal the contents of books by reading them. I drank down 1984 while loitering in the 'O' section of the giant Heffers store in Cambridge. When I was full I carried the slopping vessel of my attention carefully out of the shop.
Francis Spufford / Author
Book
Memories
Reading
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Taking the things people do wrong seriously is part of taking them seriously. It’s part of letting their actions have weight. It’s part of letting their actions be actions rather than just indifferent shopping choices; of letting their lives tell a life-story, with consequences, and losses, and gains, rather than just be a flurry of events. It’s part of letting them be real enough to be worth loving, rather than just attractive or glamorous or pretty or charismatic or cool.
Francis Spufford / Author
Loss
Real
Shopping
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