We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savour the real beauties.
Of course language is not an infallible guide, but it contains, with all its defects, a good deal of stored insight and experience.
There is no use saying you chose to lie down when it has become impossible to stand up.
How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete.
There is, hidden or flaunted, a sword between the sexes till an entire marriage reconciles them.
If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised morality to savage morality.
Lucy went first, biting her lip and trying not to say all the things she thought of saying to Susan. But she forgot them when she fixed her eyes on Aslan.
Narnia! It’s all in the wardrobe just like I told you!
Nothing is wonderful except in the abnormal, and nothing is abnormal until we have grasped the norm.
Be confident small immortals. You are not the only voice that all things utter, nor is there eternal silence in the places where you cannot come.
Perhaps the experience had been so complete that repetition would be vulgarity – like asking to hear the same symphony twice in a day.
But now I discovered the wonderful power of wine. I understood why men become drunkards. For the way it worked on me was not at all that it blotted out these sorrows, but that it made them seem glorious and noble, like sad music, and I somehow great and revered for feeling them.
The world is so much larger than I thought. I thought we went along paths – but it seems there are no paths. The going itself is the path.
We regard God as an airman regards his parachute; it’s there for emergencies but he hopes he’ll never have to use it.
The notion that everyone would like Christianity to be true, and therefore all atheists are brave men who have accepted the defeat of all their deepest desires, is simply impudent nonsense.
100 per cent of us die, and the percentage cannot be increased.
It still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous.
A moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad man thinks he is alright. This is common sense really. You understand sleep when you are awake, not well you are sleeping.
It is, of course, quite true that God will not love you any less, or have less use for you, if you happen to have been born with a very second-rate brain.
Well, whatever they say, you don’t feel like ghosts.