Joshua Gross’s Reviews > A Grief Observed > Status Update

I'm getting the feeling CS Lewis did not like going to the dentist

"I thought I trusted the rope until it mattered to me whether it would bear me. Now it matters, and I find I didn't."

"It doesn't really matter whether you grip the arms of a dentists chair or let your hands lie in your lap. The drill drills on."

"If God's goodness is inconsistent with hurting us, then either God is not good or there is no God; for in the only life we know He hurts us beyond our worst fears and beyond all we can imagine. If it is consistent with hurting us, then He may hurt us after death as understand as before it."

""But the bath of self-pity, the wallow, the loathsome sticky-sweet pleasure of indulging in it—that disgusts me."

Gresham dismisses his mother's communism as a momentary lapse in judgement

"It is all right to wallow in one's journal; it is a was of getting rid of self-pity and self-indulgence and self -centeredness. What we work out in our journals we don't take out on our family and friends."

-Madeline L'Engle, in her introduction