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“Friend," said the Spirit. "Could you, only for a moment, fix your mind on something not yourself?”
― The Great Divorce
― The Great Divorce
“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.”
― The Great Divorce
‘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.”
― The Great Divorce
“He was not a practical joker nor was he a fool but he was determinedly original and had a vague and modest idea of himself as a legendary figure. The day was beautiful and it seemed to him that a long swim might enlarge and celebrate its beauty.”
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“Rosalind: Cecelia, darling, you don't know what a trial it is to be like me. I've got to keep my face like steel in the street to keep men from winking at me. If I laugh hard from a front row in the theatre, the comedian plays to me for the rest of the evening. If I drop my voice, my eyes, my handkerchief at a dance, my partner calls me up on the phone every day for a week.”
― This Side of Paradise
― This Side of Paradise
“But the most part seemed to think that the mere fact of having contrived for themselves so much misery gave them a kind of superiority. ‘You have led a sheltered life!’ they bawled. ‘You don’t know the seamy side. We’ll tell you. We’ll give you some hard facts’—as if to tinge Heaven with infernal images and colours had been the only purpose for which they came. All alike, so far as I could judge from my own exploration of the lower world, were wholly unreliable, and all equally incurious about the country in which they had arrived. They repelled every attempt to teach them, and when they found that nobody listened to them they went back, one by one, to the bus.
This curious wish to describe Hell turned out, however, to be only the mildest form of a desire very common among the Ghosts—the desire to extend Hell, to bring it bodily, if they could, into Heaven.”
― The Great Divorce
This curious wish to describe Hell turned out, however, to be only the mildest form of a desire very common among the Ghosts—the desire to extend Hell, to bring it bodily, if they could, into Heaven.”
― The Great Divorce
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