“The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Till We Have Faces
“I was with book, as a woman is with child.”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Till We Have Faces
“It was when I was happiest that I longed most...The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing...to find the place where all the beauty came from.”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Till We Have Faces
“When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about the joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Till We Have Faces
“Death opens a door out of a little, dark room (that's all the life we have known before it) into a great, real place where the true sun shines and we shall meet.”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Till We Have Faces
“Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood.”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Till We Have Faces
“Are the gods not just?"
"Oh no, child. What would become of us if they were?”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Till We Have Faces
“No man can be an exile if he remembers that all the world is one city.”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Till We Have Faces
“I felt ashamed."
"But of what? Psyche, they hadn't stripped you naked or anything?"
"No, no, Maia. Ashamed of looking like a mortal -- of being a mortal."
"But how could you help that?"
"Don't you think the things people are most ashamed of are things they can't help?”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Till We Have Faces
“Did I hate him, then? Indeed, I believe so. A love like that can grow to be nine-tenths hatred and still call itself love.”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Till We Have Faces
“There must, whether the gods see it or not, be something great in the mortal soul. For suffering, it seems, is infinite, and our capacity without limit.”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Till We Have Faces
“But now I discovered the wonderful power of wine. I understood why men become drunkards. For the way it worked on me was not at all that it blotted out these sorrows, but that it made them seem glorious and noble, like sad music, and I somehow great and revered for feeling them.”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Till We Have Faces
“You don’t think – not possibly – not as a mere hundredth chance – there might be things that are real though we can’t see them? … If there are souls, could there not be soul-houses?”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Till We Have Faces
“The complaint was the answer. To have heard myself making it was to be answered. Lightly men talk of saying what they mean. Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek the Fox would say, 'Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words.'
A glib saying. When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about the joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Till We Have Faces
“but who can feel ugly, when their heart feels joy”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Till We Have Faces
“As for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream.”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Till We Have Faces
“I have seen something like it happen in battle. A man was coming at me, I at him, to kill. Then came a sudden great gust of wind that wrapped out cloaks over our swords and almost over our eyes, so that we could do nothing to one another but must fight the wind itself. And that ridiculous contention, so foreign to the business we were on, set us both laughing, face to face - friends for a moment - and then at once enemies again and forever.”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Till We Have Faces
“Lightly men talk of saying what they mean. Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek the Fox would say, “Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that’s the whole art and joy of words.” A glib saying. When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the centre of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you’ll not talk about joy of words.”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Till We Have Faces
“I wonder do the gods know what it feels like to be a man.”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Till We Have Faces
“Oh, I can see it happening, age after age, and growing worse the more you reveal your beauty: the son turning his back on the mother and the bride on her groom, stolen away by this everlasting calling, calling, calling of the gods. Taken where we can't follow. It would be far better for us if you were foul and ravening. We'd rather you drank their blood than stole their hearts. We'd rather they were ours and dead than yours and made immortal.”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Till We Have Faces
“It may well be that by trickery of priests men have sometimes taken a mortal's voice for a god's. But it will not work the other way. No one who hears a god's voice takes it for a man's.”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Till We Have Faces
“What began the change was the very writing itself. Let no one lightly set about such a work. Memory, once waked, will play the tyrant.”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Till We Have Faces
“Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Till We Have Faces
“I have said that she had no face; but that meant she had a thousand faces”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Till We Have Faces
“the Divine Nature wounds and perhaps destroys us merely by being what it is.”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Till We Have Faces
“The change which the writing wrought in me (and of which I did not write) was only a beginning; only to prepare me for the gods' surgery. They used my own pen to probe my wound. ”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Till We Have Faces
“And for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream. But things that many see may have no taste or moment in them at all, and things that are shown only to one may be spears and water-spouts of truth from the very depth of truth.”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Till We Have Faces
“It now seemed to me that all my other guesses had been only self-pleasing dreams spun out of my wishes, but now I was awake.”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Till We Have Faces
“This is where men, even the trustiest, fail us. Their heart is never so wholly given to any matter but that some trifle of a meal, or a drink, or a sleep, or a joke, or a girl, may come in between them and it, and then (even if you are a queen) you'll get no more good out of them until they've had their way.”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Till We Have Faces
C.S. Lewis
Born place: in Belfast, Ireland
Born date November 29, 1898
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“There are some things you can never return from. Some things you can never undo.”
― quote from Stray
“Indeed the Book of Job avowedly only answers mystery with mystery. Job is comforted with riddles; but he is comforted. Herein is indeed a type, in the sense of a prophecy, of things speaking with authority. For when he who doubts can only say, ‘I do not understand,’ it is true that he who knows can only reply or repeat ‘You do not understand.’ And under that rebuke there is always a sudden hope in the heart; and the sense of something that would be worth understanding.”
― G.K. Chesterton, quote from The Everlasting Man
“The basic common denominator of all life is the urge to survive, and the survival of life on Planet Earth is achieved only as a shared initiative with and through all life-forms. Life is a joint effort; no 'man' separate from 'nature.' Homo sapiens as individuals and as species are as much a part of life's overall thrust for survival as any other species. As living organisms, we are part if the greater whole, and as such, we are embodied with exactly the same fundamental purpose: to survive. And to do so--as individuals, families, groups, and as a species--we have to live in dynamic collaboration with the plant and animal kingdoms in a healthy, life-sustaining environment.”
― Lawrence Anthony, quote from Babylon's Ark: The Incredible Wartime Rescue of the Baghdad Zoo
“The weirdest love stories are always the best”
― Margaret Mazzantini, quote from Twice Born
“Sacrificers,” said Matchett, “are not the ones to pity. The ones to pity are those that they sacrifice”
― Elizabeth Bowen, quote from The Death of the Heart
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