“All joy... emphasizes our pilgrim status; always reminds, beckons, awakens desire. Our best havings are wantings.”

“If you think of this world as a place simply intended for our happiness, you find it quite intolerable: think of it as a place for training and correction and it's not so bad.”

“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.”

“If you love deeply, you're going to get hurt badly. But it's still worth it.”

“but who can feel ugly, when their heart feels joy”

“You are speaking...as if the pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing... what you call remembering is the last part of the pleasure.”

“Being in love is a good thing, but it is not the best thing. There are many things below it, but there are also things above it. You cannot make it the basis of a whole life. It is a noble feeling, but it is still a feeling. Now no feeling can be relied on to last in its full intensity, or even to last at all. Knowledge can last, principles can last, habits can last but feelings come and go. And in fact, whatever people say, the state called ‘being in love’ usually does not last. If the old fairy-tale ending ‘They lived happily ever after’ is taken to mean ‘They felt for the next fifty years exactly as they felt the day before they were married,’ then it says what probably never was nor ever would be true, and would be highly undesirable if it were. Who could bear to live in that excitement for even five years? What would become of your work, your appetite, your sleep, your friendships? But, of course, ceasing to be ‘in love’ need not mean ceasing to love. Love in this second sense — love as distinct from ‘being in love’ — is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by (in Christian marriages) the grace which both partners ask, and receive, from God. They can have this love for each other even at those moments when they do not like each other; as you love yourself even when you do not like yourself. They can retain this love even when each would easily, if they allowed themselves, be ‘in love’ with someone else. ‘Being in love’ first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise. it is on this love that the engine of marriage is run: being in love was the explosion that started it.”

“Now is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It won't last forever. We must take it or leave it.

“And so for a time it looked as if all the adventures were coming to and end; but that was not to be.”

“More like the real thing,' said the lord Digory softly.”

“The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.”

“One of the reasons why it needs no special education to be a Christian is that Christianity is an education itself.”

“The distinction between pretending you are better than you are and beginning to be better in reality is finer than moral sleuth hounds conceive.”

“In Science we have been reading only the notes to a poem; in Christianity we find the poem itself.”

“We know nothing of religion here: we only think of Christ.”