Samara’s Reviews > The Great Divorce > Status Update

'Do you mean there are no famous men?'
They are all famous. They are all known, remem-bered, recognised by the only Mind that can give a perfect judgement.'

Light itself was your first love: you loved paint only as a means of telling about light.

Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells, to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him. For it doesn't stop at being interested in paint, you know. They sink lower— become interested in their own personalities and then in nothing but their own reputations.

Those that hate goodness are sometimes nearer than those that know nothing at all about it and think they have it already.

But ye'll have had experiences... it begins with a grumbling mood, and yourself still distinct from it: perhaps criticising it. And yourself, in a dark hour, may will that mood, embrace it. Ye can repent and come out of it again. But there may come a day when you can do that no longer.
Then there will be no you left to criticise the mood…

All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.

There are only two kinds of people in the end; those who say to God "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, in the end, "Thy will be done.

There have been men before now who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God Himself. As if the good Lord had nothing to do but exist! There have been some who were so occupied in spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ.

"The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words "Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven." There is always something they insist on keeping even at the price of misery.