“I do not expect old heads on young shoulders.”

“Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.”

“Well,' said Ransom, 'if it is a delusion, it's a pretty stubborn one.”

“The dream is ended- this is the morning.”

“Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment.”

“There might be things more terrible even than losing someone you love by death.”

“At the end of things, The Blessed will say, “We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven.” And the lost will say, “We were always in Hell.” And both will speak truly.”

“The claim to equality, outside of the strictly political field, is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior.”

“Many things--such as loving, going to sleep, or behaving unaffectedly--are done worst when we try hardest to do them.”

“The homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only - and that is to support the ultimate career. ”

“Don't shine so others can see you. Shine so that through you, others can see Him.”

“Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of--something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat's side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possesed your soul have been but hints of it--tantalizing glimspes, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest--if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself--you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say 'Here at last is the thing I was made for.' We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the things we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.”

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

“Any amount of theology can now be smuggled into people's minds under the cover of fiction without their knowing it.”

“You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth of falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn't you then first discover how much you really trusted it?”