Samara’s Reviews > The Great Divorce > Status Update

There is but one good; that is God.
Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.

But someone must say in general what's been unsaid among you this many a year: that love, as mortals understand the word, isn't enough. Every natural love will rise again and live forever in this country: but none will rise again until it has been buried.

That's what we all find when we reach this country. We've all been wrong!
That's the great joke. There's no need to go on pretending one was right! After that we begin living.

He wanted you to love [your son] as He understands love. You cannot love a fellow-creature fully till you love God.

But there is no such thing as being only a mother. You exist as Michael's mother only because you first exist as God's creature. That relation is older and closer…He also loves. He also has suffered. He also has waited a long time.

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.