dark like blood

 

Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood.

C.S. Lewis
Till We Have Faces

I hope you do this too

try to tell the truth

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

C.S. Lewis
Mere Christianity

his real genius

(George Bernard) Shaw was a very great man indeed. The danger is that when all the froth and nonsense about his being a philosopher has died down (as it must) a reaction should set in and lead people to forget his real genius. He was a comedian, in his own time, of the very highest order. . . .He was a humorist of the more intellectual kind, a master of satire, art and fantasy like Gilbert, Wilde and Aristophanes. In that class no one had more continuous vitality. He is also, in his prefaces, one of the great masters of plain prose. I have often, in that capacity, held him up as a model to my pupils and have learned much from him myself. Peace to his ashes!

C.S. Lewis
Comedian of Highest Order
Published in The Mark Twain Journal, volume 9 no. 4 (Summer 1954)

dark like blood

Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood.

C.S. Lewis
Till We Have Faces

a tenth or twentieth reading

It must be understood the [The Hobbit] is only a children’s book in the sense that the first of many readings can be undertaken in the nursery. Alice is read gravely by children and with laughter by grown-ups. The Hobbit, on the other hand, will be funnier to its youngest readers, and only years later, at a tenth or twentieth reading, will they begin to realise what deft scholarship and profound reflection have gone to make everything in it so ripe, so friendly, and its own way so true.

C.S. Lewis
A world for children: J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit: or There and Back Again

bound together by a secret thread

You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw – but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realise that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you are transported. Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of – something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clapclap of water against the boat’s side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it – tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest – if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say “Here at last is the thing I was made for.” We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.

C.S. Lewis
The Problem of Pain

danger…

I do not think the forest would be so bright, nor the water so warm, nor love so sweet, if there were no danger in the lakes.

C. S. Lewis
Out of the Silent Planet

Living for others…

She’s the sort of woman who lives for others – you can tell the others by their hunted expression.

C.S. Lewis
The Screwtape Letters

Oh, yeah, it’s…

Sleeping on a dragon’s hoard with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart, he had become a dragon himself.

C.S. Lewis
The Voyage of the “Dawn Trader”

“They say dragons never truly die. No matter how many times you kill them.”

Suzanne G. Rogers
Jon Hansen and the Dragon Clan of Yden

My nightly craft is winged in white, a dragon of night dark sea. Swift born, dream bound and rudderless, her captain and crew are me. We’ve sailed a hundred sleeping tides where no seaman’s ever been and only my white-winged craft and I know the wonders we have seen.

Anne McCaffrey
Dragonsong

“Men like you should be left to the mercy of women like me.”

Sam J. Charlton
The Citadel of Lies

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