“Beyond a given point [we are] not helped by more “knowing,” but only by living and doing in a partly self-forgetful way. As Goethe put it, we must plunge into experience and then reflect on the meaning of it. All reflection and no plunging drives us mad; all plunging and no reflection, and we are brutes.”

People sometimes say that God becomes clearer in moments of suffering, but this is not necessarily true. What becomes clear is one's longing for God. Everything is stripped away, and very little else seems to matter.

The lesson of Wuthering Heights, of Greek tragedy and, ultimately, of all religions, is that there is an instinctive tendency towards divine intoxication which the rational world of calculation cannot bear. This tendency is the opposite of Good. Good is based on common interest which entails consideration of the future. Divine intoxication … is entirely in the present.

“I fell in love. Or, more accurately, I realized, and accepted for the first time that love was not merely a general, human possibility, nor merely the disaster it had so often, by then, been for me—according to me—nor was it something that happened to other people, like death, nor was it merely a mortal danger: it was among my possibility, for here it was, breathing and belching beside me, and it was the key to life. Not merely the key to my life, but to life itself.”