“Liking an author may be as involuntary and improbable as falling in love.”
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C.S. Lewis
“You die and you die and then you are beyond death.”
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C.S. Lewis
“Once very near the end I said, 'If you can -- if it is allowed -- come to me when I too am on my death bed.' 'Allowed!' she said. 'Heaven would have a job to hold me; and as for Hell, I'd break it into bits.”
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C.S. Lewis
“The Christians are right: it is Pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began.”
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C.S. Lewis
“Relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done.”
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C.S. Lewis
“All that we call human history--money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery--[is] the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.”
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C.S. Lewis
“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.”
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C.S. Lewis
“The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented. Even the eyes of all humanity are not enough. I regret that the brutes connot write books. Very gladly would I learn what face things present to a mouse or a bee; more gladly still would I perceive the olfactory world charged with all the information and emotion it carries for a dog. Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality... in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad of eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.”
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C.S. Lewis
“A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.”
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C.S. Lewis
“If they won't write the kind of books we like to read we shall have to write them ourselves.”
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C.S. Lewis
“You can never be really sure of how much you believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life or death to you.”
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C.S. Lewis
“For his mind was full of forlorn hopes, death-or-glory charges, and last stands.”
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C.S. Lewis
“[S]omething inside us, the feeling of resentment, the feeling that wants to get one's own back, must be simply killed. I do not mean that anyone can decide this moment that he will never feel it anymore. That is not how things happen. I mean that every time it bobs its head up, day after day, year after year, all our lives long, we must hit it on the head. It is hard work, but the attempt is not impossible.”
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C.S. Lewis
“People who know a lot of the same things can hardly help talking about them.”
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C.S. Lewis
“A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered.”
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C.S. Lewis