The people with very hard problems are understood by God. He knows what wretched machines they are trying to drive. Some day he will fling them away and give those people new ones; then they may astonish everyone, for they learned their driving in a hard school. Some of the last will be first and some of the first will be last.

Aravis also had many quarrels (and, I'm afraid, even fights) with Cor, but they always made it up again: so that years later, when they were grown up, they were so used to quarrelling and making it up again that they got married so as to go on doing it more conveniently.

I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.

If religion does not make us better people, it will make us very much worse. And of all the bad men who have lived, the religious "bad man" is the worst of all.

Forgiveness does not mean excusing.

The discomfiture we feel may be our most accurate human sensation; reminding us we are not quite "at home" here.

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.