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We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savour the real beauties.

C. S. Lewis

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C. S. Lewis
Age: 64 †
Born: 1898
Born: January 1
Died: 1963
Died: January 1
Autobiographer
Broadcaster
Essayist
Linguist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Literary Scholar
Medievalist
Novelist
Belfast
Ireland
Clive Hamilton
N. W. Clerk
CS Lewis
Clive Staples Lewis
C.S. Lewis
First
Curiosity
Beauties
Real
Fully
Asleep
Reading
Sheer
Story
Leisure
Enjoy
Laid
Given
Lust
Stories
Narrative
Savour
Firsts
Till
Rereading

More quotes by C. S. Lewis

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There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.... Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbor he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ verse latitat - the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden.
C. S. Lewis
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The very lack of evidence is thus treated as evidence the absence of smoke proves that the fire is very carefully hidden...A belief in invisible cats cannot be logically disproved although it does tell us a good deal about those who hold it.
C. S. Lewis
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And men said that the blood of the stars flowed in her veins
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God has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.
C. S. Lewis
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And so take away his work, which was his life [. . .] and all his glory and his great deeds? Make a child and a dotard of him? Keep him to myself at that cost? Make him so mine that he was no longer his?
C. S. Lewis
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Any amount of theology can now be smuggled into people's minds under the cover of fiction without their knowing it.
C. S. Lewis
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The very man who has argued you down, will sometimes be found, years later, to have been influenced by what you said
C. S. Lewis
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Forgiving and being forgiven are two names for the same thing. The important thing is that a discord has been resolved.
C. S. Lewis
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It was when I was happiest that I longed most...The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing...to find the place where all the beauty came from.
C. S. Lewis
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Watchin' and listenin' is the thing at present not talking.
C. S. Lewis
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Periods' are largely an invention of the historians. The poets themselves are not conscious of living in any period and refuse to conform to the scheme.
C. S. Lewis
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What can be better than to get out a book on Saturday afternoon and thrust all mundane considerations away till next week.
C. S. Lewis
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The false religion of lust is baser than the false religion of mother-love or patriotism or art: but lust is less likely to be made into a religion.
C. S. Lewis
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The knight is a man of blood and iron, a man familiar with the sight of smashed faces and the ragged stumps of lopped-off limbs he is also a demure, almost a maidenlike, guest in hall, a gentle, modest, unobtrusive man. He is not a compromise or happy mean between ferocity and meekness he is fierce to the nth and meek to the nth.
C. S. Lewis
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If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.
C. S. Lewis
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We must beware of the Past, mustn't we? I mean that any fixing of the mind on old evils beyond what is absolutely necessary for repenting our own sins and forgiving those of others is certainly useless and usually bad for us. Notice in Dante that the lost souls are entirely concerned with their past! Not so the saved.
C. S. Lewis
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There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, Thy will be done, and those to whom God says, in the end, Thy will be done. All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. Those who knock it is op
C. S. Lewis
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When Catholicism goes bad it becomes the religion of amulets and holy places and priestcraft: Protestantism, in its corresponding decay, becomes a vague mist of ethical platitudes
C. S. Lewis
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The discomfiture we feel may be our most accurate human sensation reminding us we are not quite at home here.
C. S. Lewis
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If minds are wholly dependent on brains and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees.
C. S. Lewis