"There's no redder rag for our modern, progressive Catholics than a certain religious approach to sex and Eros ranging from suspicion to open condemnation and branded accordingly as Manichean, neo-Platonic, Puritan, etc. Quite unacceptable. And yet in these quite obviously heretical speculations there's a barb which, even at first encounter, penetrated to the depths of my mind as the startling confirmation of something always known, and this ferment keeps on working - all the time...the idea which one finds in so many apocryphal trends of thought, i.e. that there's definitely something wrong with sex in its present form, that is, during this terrestrial aeon - something that is not sex in itself, as a whole, but some trait or quality.. Something which does not belong to original human nature, but which owes its actual existence to The Fall; in the same sense unnatural as death is unnatural and yet taken for granted, an inevitable, undeniable factor - in this fallen world."

“I'm afraid I do believe that all earthly love can die - since man is mortal, why not also his most human feature? - and for me pretensions such as love that dies was never love, etc. belong to schoolgirls' albums.”

“I just revelled in that High Mass at Beuron Abbey on All Saints' Day..Of course it's a spectacle, but that's just what makes sense, the very same sense as monasticism in general...ritual as the reflection of glory. How marvellously impersonal it is - the strict anonymity of the monks, even more impressive when they raise their hoods. They are just figures and voices. What an achievement to divest oneself of everything private, individual, to enact this holy drama day after day, indifferent to one's personal mood, representing all of us simply as mouth of the Church.”

“I'm reading a very quaint American book, The Power of Positive Thinking , written, I'd suppose, by a sectarian minister, presumably of Methodist dye. ..He's full of stories of prayers heard - and extols the power of prayer.."Before leaving for an important business conference I brace myself with texts like 'If God be for us, who can be against us?'...Then I stalk into the conference room, sure of my victory, and carry off the most marvellous deal.." This, in essence is the burden of the whole book. That's what people call Christian optimism. But it's wasted on us - we've been spoilt for this sort of thing...But isn't it rather self suggestion than authentic religious impulse? It doesn't seem to have dawned on him that suffering, disappointment, defeat or loss might also have some point too, or that God's designs could sometimes be hidden...”

“Reading lots of Dickens. Barnaby Rudge: the last Catholic pogrom - No Popery, the Gordon Riots in London - 1780, twenty years before Newman was born. He must have known people who had set fire to the houses, or taken in victims and refugees. Lord George Gordon who led the mob died as late as 1793. Old Curiosity Shop, Nicholas Nickleby - this too, is part of Newman's background, this gallery of living gargoyles, ghouls and monsters. Might account, perhaps, even for some of Newman's pessimism about the world and human nature, which some attribute merely to his own melancholy disposition? That nineteenth century!!”

“The sins of our educational system : How we ourselves were wronged by it and how we wronged others in its name. What people call moral training is really a political activity - representing a particular community and its vested interests, which is why it is so liable to political sins and blunders.”

“genuine continence and virginity are rare and costly achievements - admirable and really extraordinary; the real thing , nota bene, not simply a shrivelling of Eros-power by means of life-long taboo injections. The Ancients knew this - they called chastity, honestly, simply and humbly, a gift, a charisma, to be implored from God with tears and in humiliating experience - not just a simple athletic feat of will-power and self-control.”