Quotes From "Till We Have Faces" By C.s. Lewis

I ended my first book with the words 'no answer.' I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice? Only words, words; to be led out to battle against other words. C.s. Lewis

And for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream. But things that many see may have no taste or moment in them at all, and things that are shown only to one may be spears and water-spouts of truth from the very depth of truth. C.s. Lewis

She made beauty all round her. When she trod on mud, the mud was beautiful; when she ran in the rain, the rain was silver. When she picked up a toad - she had the strangest and, I thought, unchanciest love for all manner of brutes - the toad became beautiful. C.s. Lewis

No man will love you, though you gave your life for him, unless you have a pretty face. So (might it not be?), the gods will not love you (however you try to pleasure them, and whatever you suffer) unless you have that beauty of soul. In either race. for the love of men or the love of a god, the winners and losers are marked out from birth. We bring our ugliness, in both kinds, with us into the world, with it our destiny. C.s. Lewis

...true wisdom is the skill and practice of death. C.s. Lewis

Of the things that followed I cannot say at all whether they were what men call dream. And for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream. But things that many see may have no taste or moment in them at all, and things that are shown only to one may be spears and water-spouts of truth from the very depth of truth. C.s. Lewis

I could mend my soul no more than my face. Unless the gods helped. And why did the gods not help? C.s. Lewis

How can they meet us face to face till we have faces? C.s. Lewis

Are the gods not just?' 'Oh no, child. What would become of us if they were? C.s. Lewis

It is the gods who have been accused. They have answered her. If they in turn accuse her, a greater judge and a more excellent court must try the case. C.s. Lewis

You're a tree in whose shadow we can't thrive. We want to be our own. C.s. Lewis

We'd rather they were ours and dead than yours and made immortal. C.s. Lewis

Of the things that followed I cannot at all say whether they were what men call real or what men call dream. And for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream. But things that many see may have no taste or moment in them at all, and things that are shown only to one may be spears and water-spouts of truth from the very depth of truth. C.s. Lewis

By remembering it too often I have blurred the memory itself. C.s. Lewis

I now saw, with great dismay, that what I had been carrying all this time was not a bowl but a book. This ruined everything. C.s. Lewis

Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek, the Fox would say, "Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that is the whole art and joy of words." A glib saying. C.s. Lewis

I felt ashamed."" But of what? Psyche, they hadn't stripped you naked or anything?"" No, no, Maia. Ashamed of looking like a mortal -- of being a mortal."" But how could you help that?"" Don't you think the things people are most ashamed of are things they can't help? C.s. Lewis

The Divine Nature wounds and perhaps destroys us merely by being what it is. C.s. Lewis

It may well be that by trickery of priests men have sometimes taken a mortal's voice for a god's. But it will not work the other way. No one who hears a god's voice takes it for a man's. C.s. Lewis