A. N. Wilson Quotes
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Truth comes to us mediated by human love.
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It would no doubt be very sentimental to argue - but I would argue it nevertheless - that the peculiar combination of joy and sadness in bell music - both of clock chimes, and of change-ringing - is very typical of England. It is of a piece with the irony in which English people habitually address one another.
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I suppose if I'd got a brilliant first and done research I might still be a don today, but I hope not. People become dons because they are incapable of doing anything else in life.
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I've never had a study in my life. I'm like Jane Austen - I work on the corner of the dining table.
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It is the woman - nearly always - in spite of all the advances of modern feminism, who still takes responsibility for the bulk of the chores, as well as doing her paid job. This is true even in households where men try to be unselfish and to do their share.
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Like many people in Britain, I have an affectionate respect for the Queen, and am surprised that I should be having such republican thoughts.
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I think one of the very frightening things about the regime of the National Socialists is that it made people happy.
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When I think about atheist friends, including my father, they seem to me like people who have no ear for music, or who have never been in love.
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The fact that logic cannot satisfy us awakens an almost insatiable hunger for the irrational.
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On the rare occasions when I spend a night in Oxford, the keeping of the hours by the clock towers in New College, and Merton, and the great booming of Tom tolling 101 times at 9 pm at Christ Church are inextricably interwoven with memories and regrets and lost joys. The sound almost sends me mad, so intense are the feelings it evokes.
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I'm boring. My beliefs are neither here nor there.
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The United States is the ultimate land of optimistic promise, but it also gave birth to quintessentially pessimistic tragedy: 'Moby-Dick.'
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Personally, I think universities are finished. So much rubbish gets taught.
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I don't write books inadvertently.
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I'm starting to realize that people are beginning to want to know about me. It's a jolly strange idea.
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A busybody's work is never done.
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I've got nothing very original to say myself.
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Watching a whole cluster of friends, and my own mother, die over quite a short space of time convinced me that purely materialist 'explanations' for our mysterious human existence simply won't do - on an intellectual level.
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Of all liars the most arrogant are biographers: those who would have us believe, having surveyed a few boxes full of letters, diaries, bank statements and photographs, that they can play at the recording angel and tell the whole truth about another human life.
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Anti-Semitism is extremely common.
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Nearly all monster stories depend for their success on Jack killing the Giant, Beowulf or St. George slaying the Dragon, Harry Potter triumphing over the basilisk. That is their inner grammar, and the whole shape of the story leads towards it.
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The approach of death certainly concentrates the mind.
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I believe the collapse of the House of Windsor is tied in with the collapse of the Church of England.
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It is remarkable how easily children and grown-ups adapt to living in a dictatorship organised by lunatics.