“You can begin as if nothing had ever gone wrong. White as snow.”

“Human beings look separate because you see them walking about separately. But then we are so made that we can see only the present moment. If we could see the past, then of course it would look different. For there was a time when every man was part of his mother, and (earlier still) part of his father as well, and when they were part of his grandparents. If you could see humanity spread out in time, as God sees it, it would look like one single growing thing--rather like a very complicated tree. Every individual would appear connected with every other.”

“He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods; the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted.”

“A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.”

“In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”

“The false religion of lust is baser than the false religion of mother-love or patriotism or art: but lust is less likely to be made into a religion.”

“Mere improvement is not redemption, though redemption always improves people”

“The true reader reads every work seriously in the sense that he reads it whole-heartedly, makes himself as receptive as he can. But for that very reason he cannot possibly read every work solemly or gravely. For he will read 'in the same spirit that the author writ.'... He will never commit the error of trying to munch whipped cream as if it were venison.”

“I have learned now that while those who speak about one's miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.” 

“In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself...I see with a myriad of eyes,but it is still I who see.”

“We're free Narnians, Hwin and I, and I suppose, if you're running away to Narnia you want to be one too. In that case Hwin isn't your horse any longer. One might just as well say you're her human.”

“All shall be done, but it may be harder than you think.”

“You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.”

“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.”

“Girls aren't very good at keeping maps in their brains", said Edmund, "That's because we've got something in them", replied Lucy.”