She pulled the blanket to her breast. She was tired. Darkness came in from the periphery until the blanket was the whole of her view – and how marvellous it is, she thought, how remarkable, and it has simply been there on my lap all this time! Look how deep the blue is in the folds, look how the sun strikes it and makes the fibres burn – she lifted

‘I shouldn’t have done it. I don’t know why I did, only I’d been waiting all my life for something to happen that would change me, and it never did.

If everything that will ever happen has happened, and is happening, at last I understand how it might be possible to fall in love at a glance, and know a stranger like a lover – perhaps already that love and all the events that followed were already unfolding elsewhere, and elsewhen. And I also understand how it might be possible to despise those

Go out. Look up. Experience with me this act of grace which is common to us all. You cannot earn or command it: it is a gift, and it will be wonderful because of your wonder. Look up, with me, won’t you? Look up – and at the moment of our looking there’ll be this one marvellous thing, shining in time, under common grace: the comet-in-us.

Did women really assemble themselves out of the parts they thought most likely to be wanted? Was that love’s requirement? If so, she’d have none of it.

Most stars, I’m told, are binary stars, and these pairs affect each other profoundly. One star might waylay another in space, but find in due course it suffers from this new proximity: it is possible for one star to draw matter from another in what they call mass transfer, growing larger and more bright at a dreadful cost to its companion. In this

‘You’re our longest-serving contributor,’ said Carleton, flinching at the bang. ‘Our most admired. Indeed I should say our most popular.’ I’m beginning to speak like him, he thought: Thomas Hart is catching, that’s the trouble. ‘I’ve often heard it said that it’s a consolation – that’s the general feeling, as I said to the board – to wake on

‘For the trumpet shall sound,’ he was saying, ‘and the dead shall be raised incorruptible

It suited her few friends to imagine she’d been subject to a thousand physical and spiritual abuses, and been thrown out of chapel doors that then were bolted against her. It was difficult to explain that her father and her aunt received her absence with sorrow tempered by their trust in the will of God. She would return to Bethesda, or she