Till We Have Faces Quotes

Till We Have Faces Quotes Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis Till We Have Faces Quotes Showing “The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.” ― C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “I was with book, as a woman is with child.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “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.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “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?” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “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 “Are the gods not just?" "Oh no, child. What would become of us if they were?” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “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.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “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 “No man can be an exile if he remembers that all the world is one city.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “I felt ashamed." "But of what? Psyche, they hadn't stripped you naked or anything?" "No, no, Maia. Ashamed of looking like a mortal -- of being a mortal." "But how could you help that?" "Don't you think the things people are most ashamed of are things they can't help?” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “Did I hate him, then? Indeed, I believe so. A love like that can grow to be nine-tenths hatred and still call itself love.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “There must, whether the gods see it or not, be something great in the mortal soul. For suffering, it seems, is infinite, and our capacity without limit.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “But now I discovered the wonderful power of wine. I understood why men become drunkards. For the way it worked on me was not at all that it blotted out these sorrows, but that it made them seem glorious and noble, like sad music, and I somehow great and revered for feeling them.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “The complaint was the answer. To have heard myself making it was to be answered. Lightly men talk of saying what they mean. Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek the Fox would say, 'Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words.' A glib saying. 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?” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “You don’t think – not possibly – not as a mere hundredth chance – there might be things that are real though we can’t see them? … If there are souls, could there not be soul-houses?” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “but who can feel ugly, when their heart feels joy” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “As 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.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “I have seen something like it happen in battle. A man was coming at me, I at him, to kill. Then came a sudden great gust of wind that wrapped out cloaks over our swords and almost over our eyes, so that we could do nothing to one another but must fight the wind itself. And that ridiculous contention, so foreign to the business we were on, set us both laughing, face to face - friends for a moment - and then at once enemies again and forever.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “I wonder do the gods know what it feels like to be a man.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “Lightly men talk of saying what they mean. Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek the Fox would say, “Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that’s the whole art and joy of words.” A glib saying. When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the centre of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you’ll not talk about joy of words.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “What began the change was the very writing itself. Let no one lightly set about such a work. Memory, once waked, will play the tyrant.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “I have said that she had no face; but that meant she had a thousand faces” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “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.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “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?” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “Oh, I can see it happening, age after age, and growing worse the more you reveal your beauty: the son turning his back on the mother and the bride on her groom, stolen away by this everlasting calling, calling, calling of the gods. Taken where we can't follow. It would be far better for us if you were foul and ravening. We'd rather you drank their blood than stole their hearts. We'd rather they were ours and dead than yours and made immortal.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “the Divine Nature wounds and perhaps destroys us merely by being what it is.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “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.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “The change which the writing wrought in me (and of which I did not write) was only a beginning; only to prepare me for the gods' surgery. They used my own pen to probe my wound. ” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “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.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “This is where men, even the trustiest, fail us. Their heart is never so wholly given to any matter but that some trifle of a meal, or a drink, or a sleep, or a joke, or a girl, may come in between them and it, and then (even if you are a queen) you'll get no more good out of them until they've had their way.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “Don't you think a dream would feel shy if it were seen walking about in the waking world?” ― C S Lewis, Till We Have Faces “If we cannot persuade our friends by reasons we must be content "and not bring a mercenary army to our aid" (He meant passions.)” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “And so take away his work, which was his life [. . .] and all his glory and his great deeds? Make a child and a dotard of him? Keep him to myself at that cost? Make him so mine that he was no longer his?” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “I hid all the things I was feeling-- and indeed I did not know what they were, except that all the peace of that autumnal journey was gone” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces tags: hiding-feelings “But sweat is the kindest creature of the three—far better than philosophy, as a cure for ill thoughts.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold “By remembering it too often I have blurred the memory itself.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “And in that far distant day when the gods become wholly beautiful, or we at last are shown how beautiful they always were, this will happen more and more. For mortals, as you said, will become more and more jealous. And mother and wife and child and friend will all be in league to keep a soul from being united with the Divine Nature.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “But I was wrong to weep and beg and try to force you by your love. Love is not a thing to be so used.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “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?” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold “We are king's daughters still," I said.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “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.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek, the Fox would say, "Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that is the whole art and joy of words." A glib saying.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces tags: writing-advice “And the Divine Nature can change the past. Nothing is yet in its true form.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold “Don’t you think the things people are most ashamed of are the things they can’t help?” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold “Perhaps in the soul, as in the soil, those growths that show the brightest colours and put forth the most overpowering smell have not always the deepest root.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold “And in truth (as I now see) I had the wish to put off my journey as long as I could. Not for any peril or labour it might cost; but because I could see nothing in the whole world for me to do once it was accomplished. AS long as this act lay before me, there was, as it were, some barrier between me and the dead desert which the rest of my life must be.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “I perceived now that there is a love deeper than theirs who seek only the happiness of their beloved.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold “Do you know what it is? There's one part love in your heart, and five parts anger, and seven parts pride.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “Do you think we mortals will find you gods easier to bear if you’re beautiful? I tell you that if that’s true we’ll find you a thousand times worse. For then (I know what beauty does) you’ll lure and entice. You’ll leave us nothing; nothing that’s worth our keeping or your taking. Those we love best—whoever’s most worth loving—those are the very ones you’ll pick out. Oh, I can see it happening, age after age, and growing worse and worse the more you reveal your beauty: the son turning his back on the mother and the bride on her groom, stolen away by this everlasting calling, calling, calling of the gods. Taken where we can’t follow. It would be far better for us if you were foul and ravening. We’d rather you drank their blood than stole their hearts. We’d rather they were ours and dead than yours and made immortal.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold “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.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “And so to my fool's bed. What was that? No, no, not a girl crying in the garden. No one, cold, hungry, and banished, was shivering there, longing and not daring to come in. It was the chains swinging at the well. It would be folly to get up and go out and call again: Psyche, Psyche, my only love. I am a great queen. I have killed a man. I am drunk like a man. All warriors drink deep after the battle. Bardia's lips on my hand were like the touch of lightning. All great princes have mistresses and lovers. There's the crying again. No, it's only the buckets at the well. "Shut the window, Poobi. To your bed, child. Do you love me, Poobi? Kiss me good night. Good night." The king's dead. He'll never pull my hair again. A straight thrust and then a cut in the leg. That would have killed him. I am the Queen; I'll kill Orual too.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “Yet I have often noticed since how much less stir nearly everyone's death makes than you might expect. Men better loved and more worth loving than my father go down making only a small eddy.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “My aim was to build up more and more that strength, hard and joyless, which had come to me when I heard the god's sentence; by learning, fighting, and labouring, to drive all the woman out of me.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces 5 likes Like “The gods, not out of mercy, have made me strong.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “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.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “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.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “There was a time in childhood when I didn't yet know I was ugly. Then there was a time when I believed as girls do— and as Batta was always telling m— that I could make it more tolerable by this or that done to my clothes or my hair. Now, I chose to be veiled.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “This shame has nothing to do with He or She. It's the being mortal - how shall I say it? ... insufficient.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “a man...can find comfort in words coming out of his own mouth.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “We spoke a language, so to call it, which no one else in the huge heedless world could understand.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “I saw in a flash that if I shrank from this there would at once be less Queen and more Orual in me.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “Infinite hopes—and fears—may both be yours. Be sure that, whatever else you get, you will not get justice.” “Are the gods not just?” “Oh no, child. What would become of us if they were? But” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold “To be alone there and in silence was like coming suddenly under the lee of a wall on a wild, windy day, so that one can breathe and collect oneself again.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till we have Faces: A Myth Retold “I had at least loved Psyche truly. There, if nowhere else, I had the right of it and the gods were in the wrong.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “To be a queen-that would not sweeten the bitter water against which I had been building the dam in my soul. It might strengthen the dam, though.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek the Fox would say, “Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that’s the whole art and joy of words.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold “true wisdom is the skill and practice of death.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “I could mend my soul no more than my face. Unless the gods helped. And why did the gods not help?” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “My love for Bardia (not Bardia himself) had become to me a sickening thing. I had been dragged up and out onto such heights and precipices of truth, that I came into an air where it could not live. It stank; a gnawing greed for one to whom I could give nothing, of whom I craved all.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold “I am Ungit.' My voice came wailing out of me and I found that I was in the cool daylight and in my own chamber....Without question it was true. It was I who was Ungit. That ruinous face was mine. I was that Batta-thing, that all-devouring womblike, yet barren, thing. Glome as a web—I was the swollen spider, squat at its center, gorged with men's stolen lives.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “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? ‘Best” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold “I said not long before that work and weakness are comforters. But sweat is the kindest creature of the three--far better than philosophy, as a cure for ill thoughts.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “Have you forgotten what we are to say to ourselves every morning? 'Today I shall meet cruel men, cowards and liars, the envious and the drunken. They will be like that because they do not know what is good from what is bad. This is an evil which has fallen upon them not upon me. They are to be pitied, not...” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “On the fifth [day] Arnom came to me, himself weeping, and I knew his tidings without words. And this is a strange folly, that what seemed to me worst of all was that Bardia had died without ever hearing what it would have shamed him to hear. It seemed to me that all would be bearable if, once only, I could have gone to him and whispered in his ear, 'Bardia, I loved you.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “The one sin the gods never forgive us is that of being born women.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “I am the Queen; I'll kill Orual too.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “Of the things that followed I cannot say at all whether they were 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.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “You're a tree in whose shadow we can't thrive. We want to be our own.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “Do you tell me a strong man would break under the burden a woman is bearing well?” “Who that knows men would doubt it? They’re harder, but we are tougher. They do not live longer than we.” - Queen Orual and Ansit” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “And I thought how the seed of men that might have gone to make hardy boys and fruitful girls was drained into that house, and nothing given back; and how the silver that men had earned hard and needed was also drained in there, and nothing given back; and how the girls themselves were devoured and were given nothing back.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “I did not weep or wring my hands. I was like water put into a bottle and left in a cellar: utterly motionless, never to be drunk, poured out, spilled or shaken. The days were endless. The very shadows seemed nailed to the ground as if the sun no longer moved.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “The sight of the huge world put mad ideas into me, as if I could wander away, wander forever, see strange and beautiful things, one after the other to the world's end. The freshness and wetness all about me (I had seen nothing but drought and withered things for many months before my sickness) made me feel that I had misjudged the world; it seemed kind, and laughing, as if its heart also danced. Even my ugliness I could not quite believe in. Who can feel ugly when the heart meets delight?” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “What could I do but send him away? This is where men, even the trustiest, fail us. Their heart is never so wholly given to any matter but that some trifle of a meal, or a drink, or a sleep, or a joke, or a girl, may come in between them and it, and then (even if you are a queen) you’ll get no more good out of them till they’ve had their way. In those days I had not yet understood this. Great desolation came over me. ‘Everyone goes from me,’ I said. ‘None of them cares for Psyche. She lives at the very outskirts of their thoughts. She is less to them, far less, than Poobi is to me. They think of her a little and then get tired and go to something else, the Fox to his sleep, and Bardia to his doll or scold of a wife. You are alone, Orual. Whatever is to be done, you must devise and do it. No help will come. All gods and mortals have drawn” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold “This shame has nothing to do with He or She. It's the being mortal--being, how shall I say it? ... insufficient. Don't you think a dream would feel shy if it were seen walking about in the waking world?” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “There’s no room for two on my throne, Prince.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “My terror was the salute that mortal flesh gives to immortal things.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “You'll tell me next that the best way to cure a man's headache is to cut off his head.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “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?” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold “Ungit tells me things. I hear of terrible doings in this land, mortals aping the gods and stealing the worship due” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold “Lord, I am Ungit.’ But there was no answer.” ― C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold “You don’t think – not possibly – not as a mere hundredth chance – there might be things that are real though we can’t see them?” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “I have said she had no face; but that meant she had a thousand faces.” - Queen Orual” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “Don’t you think the things people are most ashamed of are the things they cannot help? -Psyche” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “I did not know then, however, as I do now, the strongest reason for distrust. The gods never send us this invitation to delight so readily or so strongly as when they are preparing some new agony. We are their bubbles; they blow us up big before they prick us.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “We'd rather they were ours and dead than yours and made immortal.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “It is the gods who have been accused. They have answered her. If they in turn accuse her, a greater judge and a more excellent court must try the case.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “And we said we loved her.” “And we did. She had no more dangerous enemies than us.” - Queen Orual and The Fox” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “We have all had our dream of some other land, some other world, some other way of gaining the prizes which would bring us in as conquerors; leave the smooth, rounded limbs, and the little pink and white faces, and the hair like burnished gold, far behind; their day ended, and ours come.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces “There was a time in childhood when I didn't yet know I was ugly. Then there was a time when I believed as girls do— and as Batta was always telling me— that I could make it more tolerable by this or that done to my clothes or my hair. Now, I chose to be veiled.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces