Elijah > Elijah's Quotes

“I think you should learn, of course, and some days you must learn a great deal. But you should also have days when you allow what is already in you to swell up inside of you until it touches everything. And you can feel it inside of you. If you never take time out to let that happen, then you accumulate facts, and they begin to rattle around inside of you. You can make noise with them, but never really feel anything with them. It's hollow.”
― E.L. Konigsburg, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

“You can listen to silence, Reuven. I've begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own. It talks to me sometimes. I feel myself alive in it. It talks. And I can hear it.
...
You have to want to listen to it, and then you can hear it. It has a strange, beautiful texture. It doesn't always talk. Sometimes - sometimes it cries, and you can hear the pain of the world in it. It hurts to listen to it then. But you have to.”
― Chaim Potok, The Chosen

“Look, he said to his imagination, if this is how you're going to behave, I shan't bring you again.”
― Terry Pratchett, Going Postal

“If he'd been a hero, he would have taken the opportunity to say, "That's what I call sorted!" Since he wasn't a hero, he threw up.”
― Terry Pratchett, Going Postal

“A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Always give your reader credit for being smart enough to figure out what you want to say.”
― Daniel Schwabauer

“It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.”
― C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“By this method thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools. And since what they are trying to believe may, in some cases, be manifest nonsense, they cannot succeed in believing it and we have the chance of keeping their minds endlessly revolving on themselves in an effort to achieve the the impossible.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man's best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“The Enemy wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another. The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbour's talents--or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the Enemy’s (God’s) ground…He [God] made the pleasure: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one. All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy [God] has produced, at at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which He [God] has forbidden. ”
― C.S. Lewis, Screwtape Letters

“The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease for ever to be able to do it.”
― J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan

“Second star to the right and straight on 'til morning. ”
― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

“I was looking for a miracle, but I got a story instead, and sometimes those are the same thing.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, All the Crooked Saints

“She had still been learning how to live with the hard truth that the most interesting parts of her thoughts usually got left behind when she tried to put them into words.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, All the Crooked Saints

“We almost always can point to that hundredth blow, but we don't always mark the ninety-nine other things that happen before we change.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, All the Crooked Saints

“But we all have darkness inside us. It is just a question of how much of us is light as well.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, All the Crooked Saints

“This is the way of our work: We cannot help but color it with the paint of our feelings, both good and bad.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, All the Crooked Saints

“None of us are really alone as long as we're lonely.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, All the Crooked Saints

“Reality continues to ruin my life.”
― Bill Watterson, The Complete Calvin and Hobbes

“I'm killing time while I wait for life to shower me with meaning and happiness.”
― Bill Watterson

“In my opinion, we don't devote nearly enough scientific research to finding a cure for jerks.”
― Bill Watterson

“Look! A trickle of water running through some dirt! I'd say our afternoon just got booked solid!”
― Bill Watterson

“There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

“Son,'he said,' ye cannot in your present state understand eternity...That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, "No future bliss can make up for it," not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say "Let me have but this and I'll take the consequences": little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death. The good man's past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man's past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why...the Blessed will say "We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven, : and the Lost, "We were always in Hell." And both will speak truly.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

“You cannot love a fellow creature fully till you love God.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

“Hell is a state of mind - ye never said a truer word. And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind - is, in the end, Hell. But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly. For all that can be shaken will be shaken and only the unshakeable remains.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

“As far as I'm concerned, if something is so complicated that you can't explain it in 10 seconds, then it's probably not worth knowing anyway.”
― Bill Watterson, The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes