Mike Lambert

“God’s grace is like a weather system, I thought: sunny, or cloudy, sometimes stormy, or an eerie emptiness that might be a prelude to anything, an uncertainty that tests faith.”
― Paul Theroux, My Other Life: A Wry and Deeply Moving Literary Novel of Marriage, Affairs, and Life Across Continents

“His last project was his favorite, a movie script of Milton's Paradise Lost. In an interview, Collier said, "I think the theme of Paradise Lost is singularly suited to attract a wide audience, and especially the young audience, of today. It is quasi-religious, quasi-scientific, and deeply humanistic, being the thrilling story, with which we can all identify, of how innocent, vegetarian, Proconsul or Pithecanthropus was caught up in the guerrilla war waged by Satan against the authoritarian universe, and how he emerged as moral and immoral, curious, inspired, murderous and suffering Man." The film was not made but the script was published as "A Screenplay for the Cinema of the Mind" in America in 1973. It is an astonishing thing—not quite what Milton intended—and Satan is the hero.”
― Paul Theroux, Sunrise with Seamonsters: Travels & Discoveries, 1964-1984

“Marietta was one of those large suburban houses which no family can now afford to occupy. It suggested a personage rather than a house, a minor royalty in flannels. There was so much collar and shirt-front of white balcony. There were top windows like eyes pouched by late rich dining, lower windows like a pair of bellies, the red face whiskered with creepers, the portico enlarged like a drinker's nose.”
― V.S. Pritchett, Mr. Beluncle

“We have become cynical about progress because of the terrible things we have seen men do during the last forty years. All the same through trial and error the amoeba did become the ape. There were blind starts and wrong turnings even then, I suppose. Evolution today can produce Hitlers as well as St John of the Cross.”
― Graham Greene, A Burnt-Out Case