Have you by any chance an edition of St. Ignatius’s treatise against the Gnostics?” he asked in a low clear voice. The young assistant looked gravely back. “Not for sale, I’m afraid,” he said. “Nor,...

Our crucifixes exhibit the pain, but they veil, perhaps necessarily, the obscenity: but the death of the God-Man was both.

It may be a movement towards becoming like little children to admit that we are generally nothing else.

You found the way, didn’t you?” What’s so wonderful about it? I thought. Dogs do.

The Church expected the Second Coming of Christ immediately. The converts had known a first coming. And then? And then! That was the trouble — the then. He had come, and they adored and believed,...

The hell with her; I wouldn’t go back. But wouldn’t I? What about later on? Keeping the thought of her out of that bleak hotbox of a room was going to be like trying to...

The telephone bell was ringing wildly, but without result, since there was no-one in the room but the corpse.

Her mouth was soft and moist, and she came to me like a dachshund jumping into your lap.

There is no possible idea,” Kenneth thought as he came onto the terrace, “to which the mind of man can’t supply some damned alternative or other. Yet one must act.

There was no way to kiss her like a good boy. You could start out that way, but you always ended up on the other side of the tracks. If you hated her, it didn’t...

The altar must be built in one place so that the fire may come down in another place.

I got both hands on her throat and there was nothing inside me but the black madness of that desire to kill her, to close my hands until she turned purple and lay still and...

It’s said that the shuffling of the cards is the earth, and the pattering of the cards is the rain, and the beating of the cards is the wind, and the pointing of the cards...

You can take care of everything except chance. Chance can kill you.

Why was this bloody world created?””As a sewer for the stars,” a voice in front of him said. “Alternatively to know God and to glorify Him forever.”” […] The two answers are not, of course,...

The image of a wood has appeared often enough in English verse. It has indeed appeared so often that it has gathered a good deal of verse into itself; so that it has become a...

but it was a religion which enabled him to despise himself and everyone else without despising the universe, thus allowing him at once in argument or conversation to the advantages of the pessimist and the...

An hour’s conversation on literature between two ardent minds with a common devotion to a neglected poet is a miraculous road to intimacy.