Quotes from Space Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet / Perelandra / That Hideous Strength

“It was necessary, and the necessary was always possible.”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Space Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet / Perelandra / That Hideous Strength

“I wasn’t sure whether I liked “goodness” so much as I had supposed. This is a very terrible experience. As long as what you are afraid of is something evil, you may still hope that the good may come to your rescue. But suppose you struggle through to the good and find that is also dreadful? How if food itself turns out to be the very thing you can’t eat, and home the very place you can’t live, and your very comforter the person who makes you uncomfortable? Then, indeed, there is no rescue possible: the last card has been played.”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Space Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet / Perelandra / That Hideous Strength

“Predestination and freedom were apparently identical. He could no longer see any meaning in the many arguments he had heard on this subject.”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Space Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet / Perelandra / That Hideous Strength

“For that, the journey you go on is your pain, and perhaps your cure: for you must be either mad or brave before it is ended.”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Space Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet / Perelandra / That Hideous Strength

“I do not think the forest would be so bright, nor the water so warm, nor love so sweet, if there were no danger in the lakes.”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Space Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet / Perelandra / That Hideous Strength

“And how could we endure to live and let time pass if we were always crying for one day or one year to come back—if we did not know that every day in a life fills the whole life with expectation and memory and that these are that day?” “All”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Space Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet / Perelandra / That Hideous Strength

“One goes into the forest to pick food and already the thought of one fruit rather than another has grown up in one’s mind. Then, it may be, one finds a different fruit and not the fruit one thought of. One joy was expected and another is given. But this I had never noticed before that at the very moment of the finding there is in the mind a kind of thrusting back, or a setting aside. The picture of the fruit you have not found is still, for a moment, before you. And if you wished—if it were possible to wish—you could keep it there. You could send your soul after the good you had expected, instead of turning it to the good you had got. You could refuse the real good; you could make the real fruit taste insipid by thinking of the other.” Ransom”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Space Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet / Perelandra / That Hideous Strength

“I thought,” she said, “that I was carried in the will of Him I love, but now I see that I walk with it. I thought that the good things He sent me drew me into them as the waves lift the islands; but now I see that it is I who plunge into them with my own legs and arms, as when we go swimming. I feel as if I were living in that roofless world of yours when men walk undefended beneath naked heaven. It is delight with terror in it! One’s own self to be walking from one good to another, walking beside Him as Himself may walk, not even holding hands. How has He made me so separate from Himself? How did it enter His mind to conceive such a thing? The world is so much larger than I thought. I thought we went along paths—but it seems there are no paths. The going itself is the path.” “And have you no fear,” said Ransom, “that it will ever be hard to turn your heart from the thing you wanted to the thing Maleldil sends?” “I see,” said the Lady presently. “The wave you plunge into may be very swift and great. You may need all your force to swim into it. You mean, He might send me a good like that?” “Yes—or like a wave so swift and great that all your force was too little.” “It often happens that way in swimming,” said the Lady. “Is not that part of the delight?” “But”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Space Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet / Perelandra / That Hideous Strength

“When the Bible used that very expression about fighting with principalities and powers and depraved hypersomatic beings at great heights (our translation is very misleading at that point, by the way) it meant that quite ordinary people were to do the fighting.”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Space Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet / Perelandra / That Hideous Strength

“A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking, Hmn, as if the pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing.”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Space Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet / Perelandra / That Hideous Strength

“Lifting their heads, and with no signal given as far as Ransom could see, they began to sing. To every man, in his acquaintance with a new art, there comes a moment when that which before was meaningless first lifts, as it were, one corner of the curtain that hides its mystery, and reveals, in a burst of delight which later and fuller understanding can hardly ever equal, one glimpse of the indefinite possibilities within.”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Space Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet / Perelandra / That Hideous Strength

“He had read of 'Space': at the back of his thinking for years had lurked the dismal fancy of the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds. He had not known how much it affected him till now - now that the very name 'Space' seemed a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam. He could not call it 'dead'; he felt life pouring into him from it every moment. How indeed should it be otherwise, since out of this ocean all the worlds and all their life had come? He had thought it barren: he now saw that it was the womb of worlds, whose blazing and innumerable offspring looked down nightly even upon the earth with so many eyes-and here, with how many more! No: Space was the wrong name. Older thinkers had been wiser when they made it simply the heavens. The heavens which declared the glory.”
C. S. Lewis”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Space Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet / Perelandra / That Hideous Strength

“No: Space was the wrong name. Older thinkers had been wiser when they named it simply the heavens—the heavens which declared the glory—the happy climes that ly Where day never shuts his eye Up in the broad fields of the sky. He quoted Milton’s words to himself lovingly, at this time and often.”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Space Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet / Perelandra / That Hideous Strength

“That’s what happens when you study men: you find mare’s nests. I happen to believe that you can’t study men; you can only get to know them, which is quite a different thing. Because you study them, you want to make the lower orders govern the country and listen to classical music, which is balderdash. You also want to take away from them everything which makes life worth living and not only from them but from everyone except a parcel of prigs and professors.”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Space Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet / Perelandra / That Hideous Strength

“Though he was theoretically a materialist, he had all his life believed quite inconsistently, and even carelessly, in the freedom of his own will. He had seldom made a moral resolution, and when he had resolved some hours ago to trust the Belbury crew no further, he had taken it for granted that he would be able to do what he resolved. He knew, to be sure, that he might “change his mind”; but till he did so, of course he would carry out his plan. It had never occurred to him that his mind could thus be changed for him, all in an instant of time, changed beyond recognition. If that sort of thing could happen. . .”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Space Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet / Perelandra / That Hideous Strength

“we must all be guarded by equal rights from one another’s greed, because we are fallen.”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Space Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet / Perelandra / That Hideous Strength

“This itch to have things over again, as if life were a film that could be unrolled twice or even made to work backward . . . was it possibly the root of all evil? No: of course the love of money was called that. But money itself—perhaps one valued it chiefly as a defense against chance, a security for being able to have things over again, a means of arresting the unrolling of the film. He”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Space Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet / Perelandra / That Hideous Strength

“Open, oh coloured world, without weight, without shore. You are second and better; this was first and feeble.”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Space Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet / Perelandra / That Hideous Strength

“felt sure that the creature was what we call “good,” but I wasn’t sure whether I liked “goodness” so much as I had supposed. This is a very terrible experience. As long as what you are afraid of is something evil, you may still hope that the good may come to your rescue. But suppose you struggle through to the good and find that is also dreadful?”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Space Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet / Perelandra / That Hideous Strength

“For as it was well said of the great Africanus that he was never less alone than when alone, so, in our philosophy, no parts of this universal frame are less to be called solitarie than those which the vulgar esteem most solitarie, since the withdrawing of men and beasts signifieth but the greater frequency of more excellent creatures.”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Space Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet / Perelandra / That Hideous Strength

“In your own world you have attained great wisdom concerning bodies and by this you have been able to make a ship that can cross the heaven; but in all other things you have the mind of an animal. When first you came here, I sent for you, meaning you nothing but honour. The darkness in your mind filled you with fear.”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Space Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet / Perelandra / That Hideous Strength

“He had always disliked the people who encored a favorite air in an opera—“That just spoils it” had been his comment. But this now appeared to him as a principle of far wider application and deeper moment. This itch to have things over again, as if life were a film that could be unrolled twice or even made to work backward . . . was it possibly the root of all evil? No: of course the love of money was called that. But money itself—perhaps one valued it chiefly as a defense against chance, a security for being able to have things over again, a means of arresting the unrolling of the film. He”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Space Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet / Perelandra / That Hideous Strength

“Yes,’ said Oyarsa, ‘but one thing we left behind us on the harandra: fear. And with fear, murder and rebellion. The weakest of my people does not fear death. It is the Bent One, the lord of your world, who wastes your lives and befouls them with flying from what you know will overtake you in the end. If you were subjects of Maleldil you would have peace.’ Weston”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Space Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet / Perelandra / That Hideous Strength

“it is I, I myself, who turn from the good expected to the given good. Out of my own heart I do it. One can conceive a heart which did not: which clung to the good it had first thought of and turned the good which was given it into no good.” “I”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Space Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet / Perelandra / That Hideous Strength

“You remember that wonderful phrase, how Queen Morgan ‘set all the country on fire with ladies that were enchantresses.”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Space Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet / Perelandra / That Hideous Strength

“My name also is Ransom,” said the Voice.”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Space Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet / Perelandra / That Hideous Strength

“They were astonished at what he had to tell them of human history – of war, slavery and prostitution. ‘It is because they have no Oyarsa,’ said one of the pupils. ‘It is because every one of them wants to be a little Oyarsa himself,’ said Augray. ‘They cannot help it,’ said the old sorn. ‘There must be rule, yet how can creatures rule themselves? Beasts must be ruled by hnau and hnau by eldila and eldila by Maleldil. These creatures have no eldila. They are like one trying to lift himself by his own hair – or one trying to see over a whole country when he is on a level with it – like a female trying to beget young on herself.’ Two”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Space Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet / Perelandra / That Hideous Strength

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