–Perhaps that morning she came back for me and then perhaps, astonishingly, found herself further along the Way. At all events, joy flowered between us, the joy that I had thought to be pagan joy. After all, for Christian and unbeliever, there is but one spring of joy. p. 150
–But what made [the painting] ultimately so moving and revealing was that Davy, in her divine humility, saw me called to a high destiny–the high door–and herself called to a low one. Making cookies for the students. Not counting the love poured out. That low door probably leads to a throne. p. 152
–Goodness and love are as real as their terrible opposites, and, in truth, far more real, though I say this mindful of the enormous evils like Nazi Germany. But love is the final reality; and anyone who does not understand this, be he writer or sage, is a man flawed in wisdom. p. 164
–If it isn’t just a meaningless form of words, I suppose my heart broke that night. It really means, though, loving past all measure. p. 169
–We had had what we had chosen, not business success or scholarly acclaim but a great love. And, under God, perhaps that love would save us…. But it was not to be. p. 172-3
–In writing to Lewis of my understanding of this astonishing phenomenon, I sued the analogy of reading a novel like David Copperfield that covers many years. In that book one follows the boy David running away to his Aunt Betsey Trotwood, the youth David loving Dora, the mature David with Agnes. While one reads, chapter by chapter, even as one lives one’s own life week by week, David is what he is at that particular point in the book’s time. But then, when one shuts the book at the end, all the Davids–small boy, youth, man–are equally close: and, indeed, are one. The whole David. One is then, with reference to the book’s created time, in an eternity, seeing it all in one’s own Now, even as God in His eternal Now sees the whole of history that was and is and will be. But if, as the result of death, I was now seeing the whole Davy at once, I was having a heavenly or eternal vision of her. Only, in heaven I would have not vision only but her–whole. p.185-6
–C. S. Lewis It is a Christian duty, as you know, for everyone to be as happy as he can. p. 189
–C. S. Lewis Of course [Christ] must often seem to us to be playing fast and loose with us. The adult must seem to mislead the child, and the Master the dog. They misread the signs. Their ignorance and their wishes twist everything. You are so sure you know what the promise promised! And the danger is that when what He means by ‘wind’ appears you will ignore it because it is not what you thought it would be–as He Himself was rejected because He was not like the Messiah the Jews had in mind. p. 191
–It is often said that both Heaven and Hell are retroactive, that all of one’s life will eventually be known to have been one or the other. p. 196
–The timelessness that seems to reside in the future or the past is an illusion…. The future dream charms us because of its timelessness; and I think most of the charm we see in the ‘good old days’ is no less an illusion of timelessness. p. 201
–Not only are we harried by time, we seem unable, despite a thousand generations, even to get used to it. We are always amazed at it–how fast it goes, how slowly it goes, how much of it is gone. Where, we cry, has the time gone? We aren’t adapted to it, not at home in it. If that is so, it may appear as a proof, or at least a powerful suggestion, that eternity exists and is our home. So it appeared to me. It appeared to me that Davy and I had longed for timelessness–eternity–all our days; and the longing coupled with my post-mortem vision of the total Davy whetted my appetite for heaven. Golden streets and compulsory harp lessons may lack appeal–but timelessness? And total persons? Heaven is, indeed, home. p. 203
–I attempted that spring something impossible: a sort of picture of what heaven might be… It is a heavenly afternoon. Davy and I have just had a timeless luncheon (I am assuming that God will not waste so joyous an invention as taste). I then say to her that I shall wander down to sit beneath the beech tree and contemplate the valley for awhile, but I shall be back soon. I do so. I contemplate the valley for some hours or some years–the words are meaningless here where foreverness is in the air. At all events, I contemplate it just as long as I feel like doing. Then I get up and start back, but I meet someone, C. S. Lewis, perhaps, and we sit on a bench and maybe have a pint of bitter and talk for an hour or several hours–until we have said all we have to say for now. And then I go gladly back to Davy. She, meanwhile, has played the celestial organ, an organ on which perhaps every note of a song can be head at the same time: that is, the song not played in time with half of it gone and half yet to be heard. She has played the organ for a few minutes and is just turning to greet me when I come in. Whether I was away for an hour or a hundred years, whether she has played for ten minutes or thirty, neither of us has waited or could wait for the other. For there simply is no time, no hours, no minutes, no sense of time passing. The ticking has stopped. It is eternity…. Of course it will not be like that. What it will be is quite beyond anything we can imagine. And yet it will be home. OF that we may be sure. I am as certain of timelessness to come as I am that time was the worst of the evils in Pandora’s box. p. 203-4
–If God is to be, in truth, sought first, He must be seen as heart’s desire. p. 211 (Mt 6:33)
–It would begin by my drifting away from God, only a little at first. But it is not how far; it is which direction. Away or towards. And in three years? Or ten? Time enough. And in the end, I should have come to hatred of God who had stolen my love though she still lived. The hatred of course would have been concealed as ceasing to believe. Nobody admits to hating God. p. 215
