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Ten of My Favorite Francis Spufford Quotes
Francis Spufford, a writer whom I am guessing you love? Here are our 10 best Francis Spufford quotes for you to enjoy. At Australia Unwrapped we believe every book has at least one quotable line, and our mission is to find them all. Here you will find Francis Spufford’s top 10 popular and famous quotes. Like every good writer Francis Spufford made a number of memorable quotes, here are some of our favorites:
About Francis Spufford
Spufford began writing non-fiction, but always with a strong story-telling element. His early books include I May Be Some Time, The Child That Books Built, and Backroom Boys. Also, he edited two books on polar literature. As of 2010, when he wrote Red Plenty, a combination of fiction and history exploring the Soviet Union during the Sputnik era, he has been steadily getting closer and closer to writing novels. In 2016, Golden Hill marked his definitive entry into fiction after a slight detour into religious controversy with Unapologetic. A Costa First Novel Award and three other prizes were awarded to it in 2017, and it was shortlisted for three more. His next book, Light Perpetual, is due out in February 2021, spanning the eighteenth century and the second half of the 20th century.
At Cambridge University, Spufford studied English. In 2005 and 2007, he was a Royal Literary Fund fellow at Anglia Ruskin University, and since 2008 he has taught creative writing at Goldsmiths College in London.
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Popular Quotes
“You never came out the way you came in.”
― Francis Spufford, The Child That Books Built: A Life in Reading
“Seen from that future time, when every commodity the human mind could imagine would flow from the industrial horn of plenty in dizzy abundance, this would seem a scanty, shoddy, cramped moment indeed, choked with shadows, redeemed only by what it caused to be created.
Seen from plenty, now would be hard to imagine. It would seem not quite real, an absurd time when, for no apparent reason, human beings went without things easily within the power of humanity to supply and lives did not flower as it was obvious they could.”
― Francis Spufford, Red Plenty: Inside the Fifties’ Soviet Dream
“Taking the things people do wrong seriously is part of taking them seriously. It’s part of letting their actions have weight. It’s part of letting their actions be actions rather than just indifferent shopping choices; of letting their lives tell a life-story, with consequences, and losses, and gains, rather than just being a flurry of events. It’s part of letting them be real enough to be worth loving, rather than just attractive or glamorous or pretty or charismatic or cool.”
― Francis Spufford, Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense
“If your memory was OK you could descend upon on a bookshop – a big enough one so that the staff wouldn’t hassle a browser – and steal the contents of books by reading them. I drank down 1984 while loitering in the ‘O’ section of the giant Heffers store in Cambridge. When I was full I carried the slopping vessel of my attention carefully out of the shop.”
― Francis Spufford, The Child That Books Built: A Life in Reading
“Goblins burrowed in the earth, elves sang songs in the trees: Those were the obvious wonders of reading, but behind them lay the fundamental marvel that, in stories, words could command things to be.”
― Francis Spufford, The Child That Books Built: A Life in Reading
“What follows is more about books than it is about me, but nonetheless it is my inward autobiography, for the words we take into ourselves help to shape us.”
― Francis Spufford, The Child That Books Built: A Life in Reading
“When I’m tired and therefore indecisive, it can take half an hour to choose the book I am going to have with me while I brush my teeth.”
― Francis Spufford, The Child That Books Built: A Life in Reading
“I can always tell when you’re reading somewhere in the house,’ my mother used to say. ‘There’s a special silence, a reading silence.”
― Francis Spufford, The Child That Books Built: A Life in Reading
“We are supposed to be on the side of goodness in the sense that we need it, not that we are it.”
― Francis Spufford, Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense
“God doesn’t want your careful virtue, He wants your reckless generosity.”
― Francis Spufford, Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense
10 Famous Quotes by Author Francis Spufford
Quotes for all, here you found our selection of 10 Francis Spufford quotes. Make sure you help by commenting your best Francis Spufford quote below and sharing our favorite authors so we can look them up, read some of their works and give you the best quotes we can find. We hope you enjoyed our top 10 quotes by Francis Spufford. However, feel free to comment below if you disagree or would like to include some other great and memorable Francis Spufford quotes in our list.
One Final Bonus – Francis Spufford Quote
“He cannot do anything deliberate now. The strain of his whole weight on his outstretched arms hurts too much. The pain fills him up, displaces thought, as much for him as it has for everyone else who has ever been stuck to one of these horrible contrivances, or for anyone else who dies in pain from any of the world’s grim arsenal of possibilities. And yet he goes on taking in. It is not what he does, it is what he is. He is all open door: to sorrow, suffering, guilt, despair, horror, everything that cannot be escaped, and he does not even try to escape it, he turns to meet it, and claims it all as his own. This is mine now, he is saying; and he embraces it with all that is left in him, each dark act, each dripping memory, as if it were something precious, as if it were itself the loved child tottering homeward on the road. But there is so much of it. So many injured children; so many locked rooms; so much lonely anger; so many bombs in public places; so much vicious zeal; so many bored teenagers at roadblocks; so many drunk girls at parties someone thought they could have a little fun with; so many jokes that go too far; so much ruining greed; so much sick ingenuity; so much burned skin. The world he claims, claims him. It burns and stings, it splinters and gouges, it locks him round and drags him down…
All day long, the next day, the city is quiet. The air above the city lacks the usual thousand little trails of smoke from cookfires. Hymns rise from the temple. Families are indoors. The soldiers are back in barracks. The Chief Priest grows hoarse with singing. The governor plays chess with his secretary and dictates letters. The free bread the temple distributed to the poor has gone stale by midday, but tastes all right dipped in water or broth. Death has interrupted life only as much as it ever does. We die one at a time and disappear, but the life of the living continues. The earth turns. The sun makes its way towards the western horizon no slower or faster than it usually does.
Early Sunday morning, one of the friends comes back with rags and a jug of water and a box of the grave spices that are supposed to cut down on the smell. She’s braced for the task. But when she comes to the grave she finds that the linen’s been thrown into the corner and the body is gone. Evidently anonymous burial isn’t quite anonymous enough, after all. She sits outside in the sun. The insects have woken up, here at the edge of the desert, and a bee is nosing about in a lily like silk thinly tucked over itself, but much more perishable. It won’t last long. She takes no notice of the feet that appear at the edge of her vision. That’s enough now, she thinks. That’s more than enough.
Don’t be afraid, says Yeshua. Far more can be mended than you know.
She is weeping. The executee helps her to stand up.”
― Francis Spufford, Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense
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