Quotes From "The Great Divorce" By C.s. Lewis

I wish I had never been born, " she said. "What are we born for?" "For infinite happiness, " said the Spirit. "You can step out into it at any moment... C.s. Lewis

Nothing, not even the best and noblest, can go on as it now is. Nothing, not even what is lowest and most bestial, will not be raised again if it submits to death. It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. Flesh and blood cannot come to the Mountains [heaven]. Not because they are too rank, but because they are too weak. What is a Lizard compared with a stallion? Lust is a poor, weak, whimpering whispering thing compared with that richness and energy of desire which will arise when lust has been killed. C.s. Lewis

I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road. A sum can be put right: but only by going back til you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on. Evil can be undone, but it cannot 'develop' into good. Time does not heal it. The spell must be unwound, bit by bit, 'with backward mutters of dissevering power' --or else not. C.s. Lewis

Time is the very lens through which ye see–small and clear, as men see through the wrong end of a telescope–something that would otherwise be too big for ye to see at all. That thing is Freedom: the gift whereby ye most resemble your Maker and are yourselves parts of eternal reality. But ye can see it only through the lens of Time, in a little clear picture, through the inverted telescope. It is a picture of moments following one another and yourself in each moment making some choice that might have been otherwise. . C.s. Lewis

And he had been very badly treated by a girl too. He had thought her a really civilised and adult personality, and then she had unexpectedly revealed that she was a mass of bourgeois prejudices and monogamic instincts. C.s. Lewis

There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done, " and those to whom God says, in the end, "Thy will be done." All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened. C.s. Lewis

I believe, to be sure, that any man who reaches Heaven will find that what he abandoned (even in plucking out his right eye) has not been lost: that the kernel of what he was really seeking even in his most depraved wishes will be there, beyond expectation, waiting for him in ‘the High Countries’. C.s. Lewis

Either the day must come when joy prevails and all the makers of misery are no longer able to infect it, or else, for ever and ever, the makers of misery can destroy in others the happiness they reject for themselves. C.s. Lewis

I beg readers to remember that this is a fantasy. It has of course - or I intended it to have - a moral. But the transmortal conditions are solely an imaginative supposal: they are not even a guess or a speculation at what may actually await us. The last thing I wish is to arouse factual curiosity about the details of the after-world. C.s. Lewis

Ye cannot know eternal reality by a definition. C.s. Lewis

And yet all loneliness, angers, hatreds, envies, and itchings that (Hell) contains, if rolled into one single experience and put into the scale against the least moment of the joy that is felt by the least in Heaven, would have no weight that could be registered at all. Bad cannot succeed even in being bad as truly as good is good. C.s. Lewis

Good, as it ripens, becomes continually more different not only from evil but from other good. C.s. Lewis

When you painted on earth — at least in your earlier days — it was because you caught glimpses of heaven in the earthly landscape. The success of your painting was that it enabled others to see the glimpses too. C.s. Lewis

I do not look at myself. I have given up myself. I had to, you know, after the murder. That was what it did for me. And that was how everything began C.s. Lewis

Ye can know nothing of the end of all things, or nothing expressible in those terms. It may be, as the Lord said to the Lady Julian, that all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well. But it’s ill talking of such questions.’ ‘Because they are too terrible, Sir?’ ‘No. Because all answers deceive. C.s. Lewis

There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done, " and those to whom God says, in the end, "Thy will be done." All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. Those who knock it is opened. C.s. Lewis

I shrank from the faces and forms by which I was surrounded. They were all fixed faces, full not of possibilities but impossibilities, C.s. Lewis

A sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on. C.s. Lewis