Year after year went by, and at last a man came by who treated Mr. Turnbull's secularist shop with a real respect and seriousness. He was a young man in a grey plaid, and he smashed the window.

The cross cannot be defeated... for it is Defeat.

I like everything of Chesterton's I've read so far. His style is so identifiably his, and so fun and joyful and true. This was a really crazy and wonderful adventure, and I highly recommend it. Flying spaceships and the eucharist and an asylum and a motorcar chase could only all be in the same book if Chesterton wrote it.

We do not announce on flaring posters that a man has not fallen off a scaffolding. Yet this... is fundamentally more exciting, as indicating that that moving tower of terror and mystery, a man, is still abroad on the earth.

Catholic virtue is often invisible because it is the normal... Christianity is always out of fashion because it is always sane.... The Church always seems to be behind the times, when it is really beyond the times; it is waiting till the last fad shall have seen its last summer. It keeps the key of a permanent virtue.

You complain of Catholicism for setting up an idea of virginity; it did nothing of the kind. The whole human race set up an idea of virginity; the Greeks in Athene, the Romans in the Vestal fire, set up an ideal of virginity. What then is your real quarrel with Catholicism? Your quarrel can only be, your quarrel really only is, that Catholicism has achieved an ideal of virginity; that it is no longer a mere piece of floating poetry.

He drunk in the last green and the last red and the last gold, those unique and indescribable things of God, as a man drains good wine at the bottom of his glass. Then he turned and saluted his enemy.

"I want you to hate me!" cried Turnbull, in agony. "I want you to be sick when you think of my name. I am sure there is no God."
"But there is," said Madeline, quite quietly... "Why, I touched His body only this morning."
"You touched a bit of bread," said Turnbull, biting his knuckles...
"You think it is only a bit of bread," said the girl, and her lips tightened ever so little.
"I know it is only a bit of bread," said Turnbull, with violence.
She flung back her open face and smiled. "Then why did you refuse to eat it?"

I will pay the penalty of having enjoyed God in this monstrous modern earth that cannot enjoy man or beast. I will die happy in your madhouse, only because I know what I know.

The world left to itself grows wilder than any creed... That is the only real question — whether the Church is really madder than the world. Let the rationalists run their own race, and let us see where they end. If the world has some healthy balance other than God, let the world find it. Does the world find it? Cut the world loose... Does the world stand on its own end? Does it stand, or does it stagger?