c s lewis

“ You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. ”

“ No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing. ”

“ My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. ”

“ Thus up from the garden to the Gardener, from the sword to the Smith. To the life-giving Life and the Beauty that makes beautiful. ”

“ The death of a beloved is an amputation. ”

“ Grief... gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn't seem worth starting anything. I can't settle down... Up till this, I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. ”

“ What do people mean when they say, ”

“ And now that I come to think of it, there's no practical problem before me at all. I know the two great commandments, and I'd better get on with them. ”

“ They say, 'The coward dies many times'; so does the beloved. Didn't the eagle find a fresh liver to tear in Prometheus every time it dined? ”

“ People talk as if grief were just a feeling - as if it weren't the continually renewed shock of setting out again and again on familiar roads and being brought up short by the grim frontier post that now blocks them. ”