Best 11 quotes of Simon Mawer on MyQuotes

All the answers you may wish for lie within faith, but it demands a complete and incontinent surrender, an immersion as total as any baptism. Indeed baptism is a kind of enactment of the surrender: you bathe in faith, you swim in it, you live by it, surrounded by it, buoyed up by it, engulfed by it. You drown in it, for at times it takes your breath away as entirely as any lungful of water.... All the answers lie in faith; and when you lose your faith you have no choice but to substitute for if a philosophy that deliberately and coldly offers no answers at all.

Grief and guilt. A powerful combination. Guilt like a liquid, a thin liquor, seeping everywhere, informing everything, saturating the whole-corrosive, like seawater, scented with the rich stench of ordure and corruption, and carrying with it hard, abrasive shards of grief.

If God resides anywhere ... surely he shelters behind barricades of pure chance.

I was a boarding school product from the age of eight, and I hated it. Though I do have a theory that boarding school is good training for writers because its so desperately lacking in privacy: you make space for yourself by having an interior life.

Sin is absence of God. Nothing more, nothing less.

Sometimes I think that novelists suffer from P.C.S.: Perpetual Childhood Syndrome.

The speed of the human mind is remarkable. So is its inability to face the obvious.

When you look around now we have the war on terror. Yes, okay, the World Trade Center was sort of like a single act of war, but nothing else has been. We've turned it into war. We're talking about a bunch of semi-lunatic, fanatic criminals. That's the way they should be treated.

You can tell nothing from a man's appearance, nothing except the depths of your own prejudice.

She knows what it is to be sad and miserable, but those emotions are almost enjoyable. They throw moments of happiness and laughter into sharper relief.

The shutter of the photographer's camera makes that repeated mechanical sound. That unlocking and locking of the doors of light to send momentary images of the present into the light trap of the past.