Miranda Brist

“Why do religions have edges?” asked Teresa. Sophie felt those edges now. She went into the Mission chapel. It was a small whitewashed room with deal pews, a strip of blue carpet, a carved lectern, and an altar; on the altar were brass vases filled with holly, and, between them, a brass cross. It was a little refuge of holiness and quiet in the press and hurry and alarms of the hospital.
“God is here,” said the printed text on the wall. “Yes,” said Sophie. “But,” she asked, “isn’t He everywhere? Then why do they make Him little?” And she thought of those edges, pressing against each other, hurting, jarring, offending, barring one human being from another, shutting away their understanding and their souls.
Yet if you have no edges, thought Sophie, how lonely, how drifting, you must consent to be.”
― Rumer Godden, Kingfishers Catch Fire

“You have to be very strong to live close to God or a mountain, or you'll turn a little mad.”
― Rumer Godden, Black Narcissus

“She nearly stopped forever just outside Ashton, because she came to a tiny cottage buried in a garden. I could live there all alone, she thought, slowing the car to look down the winding garden path to the small blue front door with, perfectly, a white cat on the step. No one would ever find me there, either, behind all those roses, and just to make sure I would plant oleanders by the road. I will light a fire in the cool evenings and toast apples at my own hearth. I will raise white cats and sew white curtains for the windows and sometimes come out of my door to go to the store to buy cinnamon and tea and thread. People will come to me to have their fortunes told, and I will brew love potions for sad maidens; I will have a robin.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“It is, I think, this glamour, this magic, this incomparable keying up of the spirit in a time of mortal conflict, which constitute the pacifist's real problem--a problem still incompletely imagined and still quite unsolved. The causes of war are always falsely represented; its honour is dishonest and its glory meretricious, but the challenge to spiritual endurance, the intense sharpening of all the senses, the vitalising consciousness of common peril for a common end, remain to allure those boys and girls who have just reached the age when love and friendship and adventure call more persistently than at any later time. The glamour may be the mere delirium of fever, which as soon as war is over dies out and shows itself for the will-o'-the-wisp that it is, but while it lasts, no emotion known to man seems as yet to have quite the compelling power of this enlarged vitality.”
― Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth