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1 " I ended my first book with the words 'no answer.' I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice? Only words, words; to be led out to battle against other words. "
― C.S. Lewis , Till We Have Faces
2 " The gods, not out of mercy, have made me strong. "
3 " I was with book, as a woman is with child. "
4 " It now seemed to me that all my other guesses had been only self-pleasing dreams spun out of my wishes, but now I was awake. "
5 " Don't you think a dream would feel shy if it were seen walking about in the waking world? "
6 " And for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream. But things that many see may have no taste or moment in them at all, and things that are shown only to one may be spears and water-spouts of truth from the very depth of truth. "
7 " She made beauty all round her. When she trod on mud, the mud was beautiful; when she ran in the rain, the rain was silver. When she picked up a toad - she had the strangest and, I thought, unchanciest love for all manner of brutes - the toad became beautiful. "
8 " No man will love you, though you gave your life for him, unless you have a pretty face. So (might it not be?), the gods will not love you (however you try to pleasure them, and whatever you suffer) unless you have that beauty of soul. In either race. for the love of men or the love of a god, the winners and losers are marked out from birth. We bring our ugliness, in both kinds, with us into the world, with it our destiny. "
9 " I could mend my soul no more than my face. Unless the gods helped. And why did the gods not help? "
10 " How can they meet us face to face till we have faces? "
11 " You're a tree in whose shadow we can't thrive. We want to be our own. "
12 " Of the things that followed I cannot at all say whether they were what men call real or what men call dream. And for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream. But things that many see may have no taste or moment in them at all, and things that are shown only to one may be spears and water-spouts of truth from the very depth of truth. "
13 " By remembering it too often I have blurred the memory itself. "
14 " I now saw, with great dismay, that what I had been carrying all this time was not a bowl but a book. This ruined everything. "
15 " the Divine Nature wounds and perhaps destroys us merely by being what it is. "
16 " It may well be that by trickery of priests men have sometimes taken a mortal's voice for a god's. But it will not work the other way. No one who hears a god's voice takes it for a man's. "
17 " It was when I was happiest that I longed most...The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing...to find the place where all the beauty came from. "
18 " When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about the joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces? "
19 " 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. "
20 " Death opens a door out of a little, dark room (that's all the life we have known before it) into a great, real place where the true sun shines and we shall meet. "
