Every good book should be entertaining. A good book will be more; it must not be less. Entertainmentโฆis like a qualifying examination. If a fiction canโt provide that, we may be excused from inquiring into its higher qualities.
C. S. LewisI can answer that only by hearsay, returned the Guide, for pain is a secret which he has shared with your race and not with mine; and you would find it as hard to explain suffering to me as I would find it to reveal to you the secrets of the Mountain people. But those who know best say this, that any liberal man would choose the pain of this desire, even for ever, rather than the peace of feeling it no longer; and that though the best thing is to have, the next best is to want, and the worst of all is not to want.
C. S. LewisAnd thereโs also โTo him that hath shall be given.โ After all, you must have a capacity to receive, or even omnipotence canโt give. Perhaps your own passion temporarily destroys the capacity.
C. S. LewisThe heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens - at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical Person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle.
C. S. LewisAnd yet all loneliness, angers, hatreds, envies, and itchings that it contains, if rolled into one single experience and put into the scale against the least moment of the joy that is felt by the least in Heaven, would have no weight that could be registered at all. Bad cannot succeed even in being bad as truly as good is good.
C. S. Lewis