“Affliction is often that thing which prepares an ordinary person for some sort of an extraordinary destiny.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Need-love says of a woman, "I cannot live without her"; Gift-love longs to give her happiness, comfort, protection...appreciative love gazes and holds its breath and is silent, rejoices that such a wonder should exist even if not for him, will not be wholly dejected by losing her, would rather have it so than never to have seen her at all.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“They [Narnia] are, perhaps, the greatest classics of children’s literature of the twentieth century.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Here. All of you. And you, doorkeeper. No one is to be let out of the house today. And anyone I catch talking about this young lady will be first beaten to death and then burned alive and after that be kept on bread and water for six weeks. There.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Our struggle is--isn't it?--to achieve and retain faith on a lower level. To believe that there is a Listener at all. For as the situation grows more and more desperate, the grisly fears intrude. Are we only talking to ourselves in an empty universe? The silence is often so emphatic. And we have prayed so much already”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Perhaps the experience had been so complete that repetition would be vulgarity - like asking to hear the same symphony twice in a day.”
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C.S. Lewis
“Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us.”
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C.S. Lewis
“Joy is the serious business of heaven.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“You and I who still enjoy fairy tales have less reason to wish actual childhood back. We have kept its pleasures and added some grown-up ones as well.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century - the blindness about which posterity will ask, "But how could they have thought that?" - lies where we have never suspected it... None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“She did not shut it properly because she knew that it is very silly to shut oneself into a wardrobe, even if it is not a magic one.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Children have one kind of silliness, as you know, and grown-ups have another kind.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“The death of a beloved is an amputation.”
―
C.S. Lewis
