That sudden and ill-timed love affair may be compared to this: you take boys somewhere for a walk; the walk is jolly and interesting — and suddenly one of them gorges himself with oil paint.
There is sanctuary in reading, sanctuary in formal society, in the company of old friends, and in the giving of officious help to strangers, but there is no sanctuary in one bed from the memory of another.
Perfect love means to love the one through whom one became unhappy.
People who have not been in Narnia sometimes think that a thing cannot be good and terrible at the same time.
There are two kinds of faithfulness in love: one is based on forever finding new things to love in the loved one; the other is based on our pride in being faithful.
A man too good for the world is no good for his wife.
Love matches, as they are called, have illusion for their father and need for their mother.
One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pinprick, but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger or the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.
When night comes and you too are dark lie down and be dark with a will. And when morning comes and you are still dark stand up and say to the day with a will, “I am still dark.” It is stupid to play a role with the night and the day. They would both laugh at you.
There is a palace that opens only to tears.
It is not our job to remain unbroken. Our task is to lose our lives And be born again, as trees Draw up from the great roots.
When you make the two one, and when you make the inner as the outer and the above as the below, and when you make the male and the female into a single one, so that the male will not be male and the female will not be female . . . then shall you enter the Kingdom.
And this is the house I pass through on my way To power and light.
They were lovely, your eyes, but you didn’t know where to look.
