S.J. Parris Quotes

If the universe is infinite, as I believe, then it must surely contain an infinite number of possibilities that we have not yet imagined or attempted to harness ...

I am a mixture of contradictory elements. Equal parts earth and fire, melancholy and choler, I fear. But it is more that warmth and blue skies stir the blood, do you not think?

I do not believe that any book should be denied to the man who possesses the wisdom to understand it, Bruno, but that does not mean I am confused about where truth lies.

Because I believe God is bigger than the rules we impose on one another. I think He does not mind if we find different paths to Him.

Faith and politics are now one and the same," he went on. "Perhaps it was always so, but it seems to have reached new extremes in our troubled century, do you not think? A man's religion tells me where his political loyalties lie, far more than his place of birth or his language.

felt increasingly sure that God, whatever form He took, had not created us to kill and torture one another over the name we give Him.

It is strange the way that someone who wants to find you guilty can start to make you believe in your own guilt, even when you know you are innocent. I was afraid I would condemn myself my mistake.

Indeed cocktail parties are death as I am sure 99 per cent of DS colleagues would agree. Whoever it was who suggested an international treaty banning National Day receptions should be canonised.

All our past deeds, gentlemen, one way or another, will be washed up on the shore of the present.

The Catholic chruch as threatened your life - do you not want revenge? Have you not sold your hatred to the Pretestant cause to work against the church that has hunted you?"
"No," I said simply. "I hate no one. I want only to be left in peace to understand the mysteries of the universe in my own way."
"God has already laid out for us the mysteries of the universe, or as much as He permits us to understand. You think your way is better?"
"Better than these wars of dogma that have led men to burn and fillet one another across Europe for fifty years? Yes, I do."
"Then what is it you believe?"
I looked at him. "I believe that, in the end, even the devils will be pardoned.

I realised with a prickle of discomfort why he bothered me: it was not so much that I resented the hearty backslapping bonhomie of English upper-class gentlemen, for I could tolerate it well enough in Sidney on his own. It was the way Sidney fell so easily into this strutting group of young men, where I could not, and the fear that he might in some ways prefer their company to mine. Once again, I felt that peculiar stab of loneliness that only an exile truly knows: the sense that I did not belong, and never would again.