A powerful dragon crying its eyes out under the moon in a deserted valley is a sight and a sound hardly to be imagined.

Fine feelings, new insights, greater interest in ʿreligionʾ mean nothing unless they make our actual behavior better.

Whatever you do, He will make good of it. But not the good He had prepared for you if you had obeyed him.

It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

Well,' said Ransom, 'if it is a delusion, it's a pretty stubborn one.

In reading Chesterton, as in reading MacDonald, I did not know what I was letting myself in for. A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere — "Bibles laid open, millions of surprises," as Herbert says, "fine nets and stratagems." God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.

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.