C.Rachel > C.Rachel's Quotes

“On a great day the thing that makes it great may fill the least part of it—as a meal takes little time to eat, but the killing, baking, and dressing, and the swilling and scraping after it, take long enough.”
― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

“The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.”
― C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life

“I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books.”
― C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life

“Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“Humbly let go. Let go of trying to do, let go of trying to control, let go of my own way, let go of my own fears. Let God blow His wind, His trials, oxygen for joy's fire. Leave the hand open and be. Be at peace. Bend the knee and be small and let God give what God chooses to give because He only gives love and whisper a surprised thanks. This is the fuel for joy's flame. Fullness of joy is discovered only in the emptying of will. And I can empty. I can empty because counting His graces has awakened me to how He cherishes me, holds me, passionately values me. I can empty because I am full of His love. I can trust.”
― Ann Voskamp, One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are

“I don't like work--no man does--but I like what is in the work--the chance to find yourself. Your own reality--for yourself not for others--what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“While friendship has been by far the chief source of my happiness, acquaintance or general society has always meant little to me, and I cannot quite understand why a man should wish to know more people than he can make real friends of.”
― C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life

“No time for better words, no time to unsay anything.
-Til We Have Faces”
― C S Lewis

“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's the whole art and joy of words.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood.”
― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

“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, Till We Have Faces

“No man can be an exile if he remembers that all the world is one city.”
― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

“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, Till We Have Faces

“but who can feel ugly, when their heart feels joy”
― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

“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, Till We Have Faces

“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, Till We Have Faces

“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, Till We Have Faces

“Everything is as good or bad as our opinion makes it. ”
― C.S. Lewis

“Well. You have a secret from me," he said in the end. "No, don't turn away from me. Did you think I would try to press or conjure it out of you? Never that. Friends must be free. My tormenting you to find it would build a worse barrier between us than your hiding it.”
― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

“We spoke a language, so to call it, which no one else in the huge heedless world could understand.”
― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

“Have you forgotten what we are to say to ourselves every morning? 'Today I shall meet cruel men, cowards and liars, the envious and the drunken. They will be like that because they do not know what is good from what is bad. This is an evil which has fallen upon them not upon me. They are to be pitied, not...”
― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

“I said not long before that work and weakness are comforters. But sweat is the kindest creature of the three--far better than philosophy, as a cure for ill thoughts.”
― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

“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, Till We Have Faces

“true wisdom is the skill and practice of death.”
― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

“To be alone there and in silence was like coming suddenly under the lee of a wall on a wild, windy day, so that one can breathe and collect oneself again.”
― C.S. Lewis, Till we have Faces: A Myth Retold

“My anger protected me only for a short time; anger wearies itself out and truth comes in.”
― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

“A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.”
― C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life

“No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence--that which makes its truth, its meaning--its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream--alone.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“She had come into her beauty. This was not the beauty of her youth, of which she had plenty. The beauty that I am speaking of now was that of a woman who has come into knowledge and into strength and who, knowing her hardships, trusts her strength and goes about her work even with a kind of happiness, serene somehow, and secure. It was the beauty she would always have. Her eyes had not changed. They still seemed to exert a power, as if whatever she looked at was brightened.”
― Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods