The very power of [textbook writers] depends on the fact that they are dealing with a boy: a boy who thinks he is ‘doing’ his ‘English prep’ and has no notion that ethics, theology, and politics are all at stake. It is not a theory they put into his mind, but an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all.

Youth and age touch only the surface of our lives.

But suppose you struggle through to the good and find that it also is dreadful? How if food itself turns out to be the very thing you can't eat, and home the very place you can't live, and your very comforter the person who makes you uncomfortable? Then, indeed, there is no rescue possible: the last card has been played.

If we only have the will to walk, then God is pleased with our stumbles.

There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.

Without sin, the universe is a Solemn Game: and there is no good game without rules.

The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: our instincts are merely the keys.