Corruption and envy and lust for power. Cruelty and coldness. A vicious probing curiousity. Pure, poisonous, toxic malice. You have never from your earliest years shown a shred of compassion for sympathy or kindness without calculating how it would return to your advantage. You have tortured and killed without regret or hesitation; you have betrayed and intrigued and gloried in your treachery. You are a cess-pit of moral filth.
Hope holds you fast like an anchor so you don’t give way.
He was liked when noticed, but not noticed much, and that did him no harm either.
The evening sky was awash with peach, apricot, cream: tender little ice-cream clouds in a wide orange sky.
Life is hard, Mr. Scoresby, but we cling to it all the same.” “And this journey we’re on? Is that folly or wisdom?” “The greatest wisdom I know.
You’re in a world full of color and you want to see it in black and white.
And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
You might not have more courage, but you should be ashamed to show less.
Shame to die with one bullet left, though.
It might have been a new way for her heart to beat.
Lyra had to adjust to her new sense of her own story, and that couldn’t be done in a day.
It was difficult to tell them the truth when a lie would have been so much easier for them to understand.
You won’t understand anything about the imagination until you realise that it’s not about making things up, it’s about perception.
Seems to me the place to fight cruelty is where you find it, and the place you give help is where you see it needed.
He was never the creator. He was an angel like ourselves – the first angel, true, the most powerful, but he was formed of Dust as we are, and Dust is only a name for what happens when matter begins to understand itself. Matter loves matter. It seeks to know more about itself, and Dust is formed.
She has committed great sins, but they’ve been forgiven, and that’s why she loves so deeply.
The fate of Susan Pevensie indicates some sort of crazed, deranged Manichaeism. Here’s a simple test: What is the greatest Christian virtue? Well, it’s charity, isn’t it? It’s love. If somebody who knew nothing about Christian doctrine, and who had been told that Lewis was a great Christian teacher, read all the way through those books, would he get that message? No.
A human being with no daemon was like someone without a face, or with their ribs laid open and their heart torn out; something unnatural and uncanny that belonged to the world of nightghasts, not the waking world of sense.
And for most of that time, wisdom has had to work in secret, whispering her words, moving like a spy through the humble places of the world while the courts and palaces are occupied by her enemies.
Had reason ever created a poem, or a symphony, or a painting? If rationality can’t see things like the secret commonwealth, it’s because rationality’s vision is limited. The secret commonwealth is there. We can’t see it with rationality any more than we can weigh something with a microscope: it’s the wrong sort of instrument. We need to imagine as well as measure...