Francis Spufford Unapologetic Quotes

Francis Spufford, using very contemporary idiom, calls for the same thing in this way. When discussing our sinfulness, he says: What we're talking about here is not just our tendency to lurch and stumble and screw up by accident, our passive role as agents of entropy. It's our active inclination to break stuff, "stuff" here including . . . promises, relationships we care about and our own well-being and other people's. . . . [You are] a being whose wants make no sense, don't harmonize: whose desires deep down are discordantly arranged, so that you truly want to possess and you truly want not to at the very same time. You're equipped, you realize, more for farce (or even tragedy) than happy endings. . . . You're human, and that's where we live; that's our normal experience.180 Until we fully acknowledge the chaos within us that the Bible calls sin, we live in what Calvin calls "unreality. ~ Timothy J. Keller

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

Churches are vessels of hush, as well as everything else they are, and when I block out the distractions of vision, the silence is almost shockingly loud. ~ Francis Spufford

Without faith, there'd be nothing but indifferent material forces at work. It's only when the idea of events having an author is introduced that the universe becomes cruel, as opposed to merely heavy, or fast-moving, or prone to unpredictable acceleration. ~ Francis Spufford

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

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 being 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

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

I think," he said, "that you may be the kind of dog who bites because she is chained up."
He expected her to laugh, or to flash out at him, or to do both. She did not look up, but with a melancholy kind of trouble in her eyes.
"A lovely analogy: I thank you," she said. "But what if I am the kind of dog who bites because it pleases her?"
"I don't believe it," said Smith. ~ Francis Spufford

Seen from that future time, when every commodity the human mind could imagine would flow from the industrial horn of plenty in dizzy abundance, this would seem a scanty, shoddy, cramped moment indeed, choked with shadows, redeemed only by what it caused to be created.
Seen from plenty, now would be hard to imagine. It would seem not quite real, an absurd time when, for no apparent reason, human beings went without things easily within the power of humanity to supply and lives did not flower as it was obvious they could. ~ Francis Spufford

Some people ask nowadays what kind of a religion it is that chooses an instrument of torture for its symbol, as if the cross on churches must represent some kind of endorsement. The answer is: one that takes the existence of suffering seriously. ~ Francis Spufford

By now the night tastes of nothing but ash. But nicotine substitutes for food, nicotine substitutes for sleep, and there is so little time left for the future, once all the demands of the present are taken care of. ~ Francis Spufford

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

You ask for help and you get nothing: on a conscious level you may have decided that there was nobody there to help, but less consciously, since you did ask, it feels as if help was denied. Hence the angry edge that sometimes sharpens disbelief when it's been renewed by one of these episodes of fruitless asking. In the words of Samuel Beckett, "He doesn't exist, the bastard!" The life of faith has just as many he-doesn't-exist-the-bastard moments as the life of disbelief. Probably more of them, if anything, given that we believers tend to return to the subject more often, producing many more opportunities to be disappointed. ~ Francis Spufford

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

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

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

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

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

Anyone can be self-educated if they find the loose end of something to care about passionately. ~ Francis Spufford

Self-awareness is not the same thing as self-approval, any more than imagination is the same thing as day-dreaming. ~ Francis Spufford

We are supposed to be on the side of goodness in the sense that we need it, not that we are it. ~ Francis Spufford

He cannot do anything deliberate now. The strain of his whole weight on his outstretched arms hurts too much. The pain fills him up, displaces thought, as much for him as it has for everyone else who has ever been stuck to one of these horrible contrivances, or for anyone else who dies in pain from any of the world's grim arsenal of possibilities. And yet he goes on taking in. It is not what he does, it is what he is. He is all open door: to sorrow, suffering, guilt, despair, horror, everything that cannot be escaped, and he does not even try to escape it, he turns to meet it, and claims it all as his own. This is mine now, he is saying; and he embraces it with all that is left in him, each dark act, each dripping memory, as if it were something precious, as if it were itself the loved child tottering homeward on the road. But there is so much of it. So many injured children; so many locked rooms; so much lonely anger; so many bombs in public places; so much vicious zeal; so many bored teenagers at roadblocks; so many drunk girls at parties someone thought they could have a little fun with; so many jokes that go too far; so much ruining greed; so much sick ingenuity; so much burned skin. The world he claims, claims him. It burns and stings, it splinters and gouges, it locks him round and drags him down…

All day long, the next day, the city is quiet. The air above the city lacks the usual thousand little trails of smoke from cookfires. Hymns rise from the temple. Fa ~ Francis Spufford

That's right,' said Morin smoothly. 'We had better just let Marfa Timofeyevna finish keeping us on the straight and narrow.' Somehow his tone as he said this managed to suggest both that censorship was silly, and that it was silly to mind it. Galich conceded Morin a small internal round of (Applause), his headache whispering in his temples. He was highly accomplished himself at finding pleasure-giving, urbane descriptions of what couldn't be helped, but Morin, moreover, had hit the precise note of the moment, liberally-minded yet unchallenging, ironic yet inoffensive. The ~ Francis Spufford

I need fiction, I am an addict. This is not a figure of speech. I don't quite read a novel a day, but I certainly read some of a novel every day, and usually some of several. There is always a heap of opened paperbacks face down near the bed, always something current on the kitchen table to reach for over coffee when I wake up. Colonies of prose have formed in the bathroom and in the dimness of the upstairs landing, so that I don't go without text even in the leftover spaces of the house where I spend least time….I can be happy with an essay or a history if it interlaces like a narrative, if its author uses fact or impression to make a story-like sense, but fiction is kind, fiction is the true stuff….I don't give it up. It is entwined too deeply within my history, it has been forming the way I see for too long. ~ Francis Spufford

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

Take the famous slogan on the atheist bus in London … "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life." … The word that offends against realism here is "enjoy." I'm sorry - enjoy your life? Enjoy your life? I'm not making some kind of neo-puritan objection to enjoyment. Enjoyment is lovely. Enjoyment is great. The more enjoyment the better. But enjoyment is one emotion … Only sometimes, when you're being lucky, will you stand in a relationship to what's happening to you where you'll gaze at it with warm, approving satisfaction. The rest of the time, you'll be busy feeling hope, boredom, curiosity, anxiety, irritation, fear, joy, bewilderment, hate, tenderness, despair, relief, exhaustion … This really is a bizarre category error.
But not necessarily an innocent one … The implication of the bus slogan is that enjoyment would be your natural state if you weren't being "worried" by us believer … Take away the malignant threat of God-talk, and you would revert to continuous pleasure, under cloudless skies. What's so wrong with this, apart from it being total bollocks?
… Suppose, as the atheist bus goes by, that you are the fifty-something woman with the Tesco bags, trudging home to find out whether your dementing lover has smeared the walls of the flat with her own shit again. Yesterday when she did it, you hit her, and she mewled till her face was a mess of tears and mucus which you also had to clean up. The only thing that would ease the weight on you ~ Francis Spufford

It is not for us to know who does and does not manage to accept forgiveness, but if the love really never stops, if God really does long for every lost soul, then in principle God regards as forgivable a whole load of stuff we really don't want forgiven, thank you. People who use airliners to murder thousands of office workers, people who strut about Norwegian summer camps stealing the lives of teenagers with careful shots to the head, people who drive over their gay neighbor in their pick-up truck and then reverse and do it again, people who torture children for sexual pleasure: God is apparently ready to rush right in there and give them all a hug, the bastard. We don't want that. We want justice, dammit, if not in this world then in the next. We want God's extra-niceness confined to deserving cases such as, for example, us, and a reliable process of judgment put in place which will ensure that the child-murderers are ripped apart with red-hot tongs. ~ Francis Spufford

I was never argued out of faith; it was much more passive than that - and I wasn't argued back in, either. ~ Francis Spufford

You never came out the way you came in. ~ Francis Spufford

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

What is the tactful, the effective way of announcing that your life's work has been wasted? ~ Francis Spufford

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

It's always struck me as unfair that writing has so little sensation when it's going well. ~ Francis Spufford

The part of thinking that's easy to handle is the part that works by analogy with speech. Thinking in words, speaking our thoughts internally, projects an auditorium inside our skulls. Dark or bright, a shadow theater or a stage scorched by klieg lights, here we try out voices, including the voice we have settled on as the familiar sound of our identity, although it may not be what other people hear when we speak aloud. But that is the topmost of the linguistic processes going on in the mind. Beneath the auditorium runs a continuous river of thought that not only is soundless but is not ordered so it can be spoken. For obvious reasons, describing it is difficult. If I dip experimentally into the wordless flow, and then try to recall the sensations of it, I have the impression of a state in which grammar is present – for when I think like this I am certainly construing lucid relationships between different kinds of meaning, and making sense of the world by distinguishing between (for a start) objects and actions – but thought there are so to speak nounlike and verblike concentrations in the flow, I do not solidify them, I do not break them off into word-sized units. Are there pictures? Yes, but I am not watching a slide show, the images do not come in units either. Sometimes there's a visual turbulence – rapid, tumbling, propelled – that doesn't resolve into anything like the outlines of separate images. Sometimes one image, like a key, will hold steady while a whole train of ~ Francis Spufford

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

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

When is it that you can say you believe? It's tricky, since belief is often so intermittent; is so often checkered through or stippled through with disbelief; is so much something come upon, or sensed out of the corner of the mind's eye, rather than securely possessed. Is it when you feel you've found something? Or is it much earlier: when you feel the need that will make you start looking? When you do start looking? When you fail to find anything and yet somehow don't give up the hope that you might find something some day? Maybe it's when you hope at all, in this direction. ~ Francis Spufford

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

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

If you want to understand function, study structure, ~ Francis Crick

If we see someone who needs help, do we stop? There is so much suffering and poverty, and a great need for good Samaritans. ~ Pope Francis

Hath any wronged thee? be bravely revenged; slight it, and the work is begun; forgive it, and it is finished; he is below himself that is not above an injury. ~ Francis Quarles

I don't bed with children.'

'Rumour says,' said Catherine d'Albon, 'that you did. Or are the Knights of St John all mistaken?'

'You know too much,' said Francis Crawford slowly. 'Shall I amend it? I don't bed with young girls who are virgins, unless they ask me, and unless I am married to them. ~ Dorothy Dunnett

It is remarkable, the lines that connect people. You can strike up a conversation with someone, a stranger even, and discover that you have a friend in common, that your aunts were from the same town, or that his best friend can grease your way into Bhutan. It seems on those occasions that we are all like strands of DNA, spun around each other in a double helix. ~ Francis Slakey

A photograph gives us the naked truth,which has to be clothed by the imagination. ~ Francis Meadow Sutcliffe

Peter of Jerusalem told his followers that they should be prepared to give an account (logos) of the hope that is in them (I Pt 3: 15). The logos that Peter referred to is, in the final instance, a Person, the eternal Word of God, the ultimate explanation of our life, our movement, and our being. ~ Francis George

If we do what we think is right, not try to point-score, people will begin to trust us. ~ Francis Maude

Unlike Francis Crawford, whose game with life was a strange and rootless affair played with the intellect, Jerott had a passionate instinct to live. It was a happy circumstance also that his nervous and bronchial systems were roughly as frail as a bison's. ~ Dorothy Dunnett