Status Updates From The Screwtape Letters

Screwtape: "Fear, avarice, lust and ambition look ahead. Do not think lust an exception. When the present pleasure arrives, the sin (which alone interests us) is already over. The pleasure is just part of the process which we regret and would exclude if we could do so without losing the sin; it is the part contributed by [God], and...experienced in [the] present. The sin, which is our contribution, looked forward."

Screwtape: "Even of his sins the Enemy does not want him to think too much: once they are repented, the sooner the man turns his attention outward, the better the Enemy is pleased."

{God] would rather the man though himself a great architect or a great poet and then forgot about it, than that he should spend much time and pains trying to think himself a bad one.

"All virtues are less formidable...once the man is aware that he has them."

Well, piffle, that's almost the same thing I wrote in my review of Bonhoeffer. And here I thought I had come up with the idea on my own. This is both the good thing and the bad thing of reading good books when you are young, their thought seeps into you, even if you don't recognize it until you see it again.