Redbird

“I wish I’d never been born,’ it said. ‘What are we born for?’
‘For infinite happiness,’ said the Spirit. ‘You can step out into it at any moment…’
‘But, I tell you, they’ll see me.’
‘An hour hence and you will not care. A day hence and you will laugh at it. Don’t you remember on earth—there were things too hot to touch with your finger but you could drink them all right? Shame is like that.”
― C. S.Lewis, The Great Divorce

“Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” There is always something they insist on keeping even at the price of misery. There is always something they prefer to joy—that is, to reality. Ye see it easily enough in a spoiled child that would sooner miss its play and its supper than say it was sorry and be friends.”
― C. S.Lewis, The Great Divorce

“Friend," said the Spirit. "Could you, only for a moment, fix your mind on something not yourself?”
― C. S.Lewis, The Great Divorce

“Of course. Having allowed oneself to drift, unresisting, unpraying, accepting every half-conscious solicitation from our desires, we reached a point where we no longer believed the Faith. Just in the same way, a jealous man, drifting and unresisting, reaches a point at which he believes lies about his best friend: a drunkard reaches a point at which (for the moment) he actually believes that another glass will do him no harm. The beliefs are sincere in the sense that they do occur as psychological events in the man’s mind. If that’s what you mean by sincerity they are sincere, and so were ours. But errors which are sincere in that sense are not innocent.”
― C. S.Lewis, The Great Divorce