Samara’s Reviews > The Great Divorce > Status Update

'Once you were a child. Once you knew what inquiry was for. There was a time when you asked questions because you wanted answers, and were glad when you had found them. Become that child again: even now.'
'Ah, but when I became a man I put away childish things.'
'You have gone far wrong. Thirst was made for water; inquiry for truth.

'But you must feel yourself that there is something stifling about the idea of finality? Stagnation, my dear boy, what is more soul-destroying than stagnation?'
‘You think that, because hitherto you have experienced truth only with the abstract intellect. I will bring you where you can taste it like honey and be embraced by it as by a bridegroom. Your thirst shall be quenched.'

‘Ah, but we must all interpret those beautiful words in our own way! For me there is no such thing as a final answer. The free wind of inquiry must always continue to blow through the mind, must it not? "Prove all things" ... to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.'
" If that were true, and known to be true, how could anyone travel hopefully? There would be nothing to hope for.'

Having allowed oneself to drift, unresisting, unpraying, accepting every half-conscious solicitation from our desires, we reached a point where we no longer believed the Faith. Just in the same way, a jealous man, drifting and unresisting, reaches a point at which he believes lies about his best friend: a drunkard reaches a point at which he believes that another glass will do him no harm...

At College, you know, we just started automatically writing the kind of essays that got good marks and saying the kind of things that won applause. When, in our whole lives, did we honestly face, in solitude, the one question on which all turned: whether after all the Supernatural might not in fact occur? When did we put up one moment's real resistance to the loss of our faith?'

What's the trouble about this place? Not that people are quarrelsome — that's only human nature …The trouble is they have no Needs. You get everything you want…by just imagining it…there's no proper economic basis for any community life. If they needed real shops, chaps would have to stay near where the real shops were...It's scarcity that enables a society to exist.

I think earth, if chosen instead of Heaven, will turn out to have been, all along, only a region in Hell: and earth, if put second to Heaven, to have been from the beginning a part of Heaven itself.

If we insist on keeping Hell (or even Earth) we shall not see Heaven: if we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell.