For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity.
The Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most temporal part of time--for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays.
Any amount of theology can be smuggled into people's minds under cover of romance without them knowing it.
I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it ...
You can do more with a castle in a story than with the best cardboard castle that ever stood on a nursery table.
[God] will not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of heaven as a shortcut to the nearest chemist's shop.
Hence the uneasiness which they arouse in those who, for whatever reason, wish to keep us wholly imprisoned in the immediate conflict. That perhaps is why people are so ready with the charge of "escape." I never fully understood it till my friend Pro...
He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods; the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted.
The value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by ‘the veil of familiarity.’ The child enjoys his cold meat, otherwise dull to him, by pretending it is buffalo, just ...
Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.
You will remember how, as a schoolboy, I had destroyed my religious life by a vicious subjectivism which made 'realizations' the aim of prayer; turning away from God to seek states of mind, and trying to produce those states of mind by 'maistry'.
Good characters in fiction are the very devil. Not only because most authors have too little material to make them of, but because we as readers have a strong subconscious wish to find them incredible.
Doubtless, by definition, God was Reason itself. But would he also be "reasonable" [...]
Surely arrested development consists not in refusing to lose old things but in failing to add new things.
Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one--the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts,...Your affectionate uncle, Screwtape.
We must picture hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives with the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment.
this is a book about something
As he rose to his feet he noticed that he was neither dripping nor panting for breath as anyone would expect after being under water. His clothes were perfectly dry. He was standing by the edge of a small pool—not more than ten feet from side to si...
That's all YOU know,' said Digory. 'It's because you're a girl. Girls never want to know anything but gossip and rot about people getting engaged.
There may be two views about humans. But there's no two views about things that look like humans and aren't...But in general, take my advice, when you meet anything that's going to be human and isn't yet, or used to be human once and isn't now, or ou...
You know me better than you think, you know, and you shall know me better yet.
