Irma Servatius

“A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking, Hmn, as if the pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing.”
― C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet

“We do not truly see light, we only see slower things lit by it, so that for us light is on the edge-the last thing we know before things become too swift for us.”
― C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet

“The hrossa used to have many books of poetry,” they added. “But now they have fewer. They say that the writing of books destroys poetry.”
― C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet

“Reading [Mauriac's] 'memoirs' is like meeting a man on a train who says, 'Don't look at me, that's misleading. If you want to know what I'm like, wait until we're in a tunnel, and then study my reflection in the window.' You wait, and look, and catch a face against a shifting background of sooty walls, cables and sudden brickwork. The transparent shape flickers and jumps, always a few feet away. You become accustomed to its existence, you move with its movements; and though you know its presence is conditional, you feel it to be permanent. Then there is a wail from ahead, a roar and a burst of light; the face is gone for ever.”
― Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot