Top 11 Francis Spufford Quotes

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.