Don Palmer

“While the past is lost for ever, everything that didn’t happen in it is doubly lost. This creates a particular kind of feeling of loss, the melancholy of an unrealized past.”
― James K.A. Smith, How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now

“He who does not merit—Beatrice? say, ‘salute’, salvation—need not hope to find her. But this is to identify Beatrice with salvation? Yes, and this is the identity of the Image with that beyond the Image. Beatrice is the Image and the foretaste of salvation.”
― Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice: A Study in Dante

“Eros is often our salvation from a false agape, as agape is from tyrannical eros. Redemption is everywhere exchanged.”
― Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice: A Study in Dante

“He was also a poet, and a particular kind of poet; what kind he describes in the Purgatorio (XXIV, 52-63) Io mi son un che, quando Amor mi spira, noto, ed a quel modo che ditta dentro, vo significando. ‘I am one who, when Love breathes in me, note it, and expound it after whatever manner he dictates.”
― Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice: A Study in Dante