Justin Griffiths-Bell

“Suffering is no scandal. It is natural. Nature appoints it. All creation suffers. It suffers from having been created, if from nothing else. It suffers from being divided from God.'
'Yours is a melancholy sort of religion, Dennis. I'm afraid I don't believe in God.'
'Ah, you do. But you do not know His name. And I who know His name am only the better of you by one little word. Here is the salmon pool.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Unicorn

“Man is a mechanism for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.”
― John Updike, Rabbit Redux

“In the old days, Christmas lights had come in short strings that were wired serially. If a single bulb burned out or even just loosened in its socket, the circuit was broken and the entire string went dark. One of the season’s rituals for Gary and Chip had been to tighten each little brass-footed bulb in a darkened string and then, if this didn’t work, to replace each bulb in turn until the dead culprit was found. (What joy the boys had taken in the resurrection of a string!) By the time Denise was old enough to help with the lights, the technology had advanced. The wiring was parallel, and the bulbs had snap-in plastic bases. A single faulty light didn’t affect the rest of the community but identified itself instantly for instant replacement . . .”
― Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

“The history of the centuries in this valley is the history of an independent man who grapples barehanded with the spectre which bears a new and ever a newer name. Sometimes the spectre is some half-divine fiend who lays a curse on his land. Sometimes it breaks his bones in the guise of a norn. Sometimes it destroys his croft in the form of a monster. And yet, always, to all eternity, it is the same spectre assailing the same man century after century.”
― Halldór Laxness, Independent People