To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will most certainly be wrung and possibly broken ... The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

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?

The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.

It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.

Besides being complicated, reality, in my experience, is usually odd. It is not neat, not obvious, not what you expect.

We were talking of DRAGONS, Tolkien and I In a Berkshire bar. The big workman Who had sat silent and sucked his pipe All the evening, from his empty mug With gleaming eye glanced towards us: "I seen 'em myself!" he said fiercely.

If you live for the next world, you get this one in the deal; but if you live only for this world, you lose them both.