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.
You have no idea what an appetite it gives one, being executed.
At least he went on saying this till Aslan had loaded him up with three dwarfs, one dryad, two rabbits, and a hedgehog, that steadied him a bit.
I expect you have seen someone put a a lighted match to a bit of newspaper which is propped up in a grate against an unlit fire. And for a second nothing seems to have happened; and then you notice a tiny steak of flame creeping along the edged of the newspaper. It was like that now.
Ah, poor Pole. It’s been to much for her, this last bit. Turned her head, I shouldn’t wonder. She’s beginning to see things.
The whole journey was odd and dream-like – the roaring stream, the wet grey grass, the glimmering cliffs which they were approaching, and always the glorious, silently pacing beast ahead.
Her face was working and twitching with passion, but his looked up at the sky, still quiet, neither angry nor afraid, but a little sad.
Here at last is the thing I was made for.
No people find each other more absurd than lovers.
Nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.
Reality, in fact, is always something you couldn’t have guessed. That’s one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It’s a religion you couldn’t have guessed.