Charles Williams

“The Divine Thing that made itself the foundation of the Church does not seem, to judge by his comments on the religious leadership of his day, to have hoped much from officers of a church.”

“The telephone bell was ringing wildly, but without result, since there was no-one in the room but the corpse.”

“There is no possible idea," Kenneth thought as he came onto the terrace, "to which the mind of man can't supply some damned alternative or other. Yet one must act.”

“Job plunges into a series of demands on and accusations of God which may be and indeed are epigrams of high intelligence, but are not noticeably patient.”

“Of Adam and Eve: They had what they wanted. That they did not like it when they got it does not alter the fact that they certainly got it.”

“. Nature's so terribly good. Don't you think so, Mr. Stanhope?"Stanhope was standing by, silent, while Mrs. Parry communed with her soul and with one or two of her neighbours on the possibilities of dressing the Chorus. He turned his head and answered, "That Nature is terribly good? Yes, Miss Fox. You do mean 'terribly'?""Why, certainly," Miss Fox said. "Terribly--dreadfully--very.""Yes," Stanhope said again. "Very. Only--you must forgive me; it comes from doing so much writing, but when I say 'terribly' I think I mean 'full of terror'. A dreadful goodness.""I don't see how goodness can be dreadful," Miss Fox said, with a shade of resentment in her voice. "If things are good they're not terrifying, are they?""It was you who said 'terribly'," Stanhope reminded her with a smile, "I only agreed.""And if things are terrifying," Pauline put in, her eyes half closed and her head turned away as if she asked a casual question rather of the world than of him, "can they be good?"He looked down on her. "Yes, surely," he said, with more energy. "Are our tremors to measure the Omnipotence?”

“The most he would do was to promise that the gates of hell should not prevail against it. It is about all that, looking back on the history of the Church, one can feel that they have not done.”

“The famous saying 'God is love', it is generally assumed, means that God is like our immediate emotional indulgence, not that the meaning of love ought to have something of the 'otherness' and terror of God.”

“To forgive and to be forgiven are the two points of holy magnificence and holy modesty; round these two centres the whole doctrine of largesse revolves.”

“The image of a wood has appeared often enough in English verse. It has indeed appeared so often that it has gathered a good deal of verse into itself; so that it has become a great forest where, with long leagues of changing green between them, strange episodes of poetry have taken place. Thus in one part there are lovers of a midsummer night, or by day a duke and his followers, and in another men behind branches so that the wood seems moving, and in another a girl separated from her two lordly young brothers, and in another a poet listening to a nightingale but rather dreaming richly of the grand art than there exploring it, and there are other inhabitants, belonging even more closely to the wood, dryads, fairies, an enchanter's rout. The forest itself has different names in different tongues- Westermain, Arden, Birnam, Broceliande; and in places there are separate trees named, such as that on the outskirts against which a young Northern poet saw a spectral wanderer leaning, or, in the unexplored centre of which only rumours reach even poetry, Igdrasil of one myth, or the Trees of Knowledge and Life of another. So that indeed the whole earth seems to become this one enormous forest, and our longest and most stable civilizations are only clearings in the midst of it.”

“Every contrition for sin is apt to encourage a not quite charitable wish that other people should exhibit a similar contrition.”

“but it was a religion which enabled him to despise himself and everyone else without despising the universe, thus allowing him at once in argument or conversation to the advantages of the pessimist and the optimist.”

“I think in order to move forward into the future, you need to know where you've been.”

“Play and pray; but on the whole do not pray when you are playing and do not play when you are praying.”

“It is as pleasant as it is unusual to see thoroughly good people getting their deserts.”

“Many promising reconciliations have broken down because while both parties come prepared to forgive, neither party come prepared to be forgiven.”

“An hour's conversation on literature between two ardent minds with a common devotion to a neglected poet is a miraculous road to intimacy.”

“It is easier often to forgive than to be forgiven; yet it is fatal to be willing to be forgiven by God and to be reluctant to be forgiven by men.”

“Hell is indefinite.”

“, Stanhope delayed a moment behind Miss Fox to add: "The substantive, of course, governs the adjective; not the other way round.""The substantive?" Pauline asked blankly."Good. It contains terror, not terror good. I'm keeping you. Good-bye, Periel," and he was gone.”